Summer came to a dark end on Labor Day weekend as four drownings occurred along the Jersey Shore. In each case, the swimmers were pulled out to sea by rip currents. Lifeguards and beachgoers carried out dozens of water rescues.
“The water was very, very bad and it was very, very hot. So we really couldn’t keep them out,” Joe Bongiovanni, Asbury Park’s beach safety supervisor, said of Labor Day weekend.
Bongiovanni said someone with a trained eye can spot a rip current from the shore. “The water gets discolored and you get a little bit of a ripple effect … As the waves come in, you can see that it actually pushes through the wave coming in and … cuts right through it. And then you got a big what they call a rip head at the end of it [that] looks like a mushroom,” he said.
Rip currents become more common later in the summer, as hurricane season picks up and tropical storms churn up the Atlantic Ocean. Hurricane Lee, a category 4 storm moving slowly toward the East Coast, is already contributing to rip current conditions in New Jersey.
