In the years 2000 to 2006, 20 people drowned in the Russian River in Sonoma County and 14 of them were young Hispanic men, the County Coroner's records show. "The Hispanic community comprises 20 percent of the resident population in Sonoma, but accounts for 75 percent of drowning deaths that occur in our rivers, lakes, and pools," according to the Red Cross of Sonoma County.

Maria Moto-Fincher, station manager of Univision's KDTV 28 in Santa Rosa, has been aware of these drownings for years. "Since 1965 I've lived near the river," she said. "Every summer, when I heard the helicopter really low, people went missing." She and others believe that many of the casualties are seasonal agricultural workers from Latin America, especially Mexico.

"They come from the heart of Mexico," she explained. "They don't have access to rivers and lakes. They're poor. They just come here to work for the season. They work, they go to the river with friends for a picnic, they drink, because that is what they do. Then they swim. The river is too strong for them and--" She shrugged in frustration.

In the heat of summer, many agricultural workers, as well as local families in the region, seek out the cool and deceptively inviting river, unaware of the strength of the currents and the rapid changes that can occur. As a result, all too often, bodies of young men are shipped back to places like Jalisco and Michoacán.

Moto-Fincher is passionately committed to spreading the word about river hazards through her Spanish-language television program in hopes of helping to save lives. "We did a one-minute public service announcement for the Red Cross last year," she said. "That was the first thing they had in Spanish." The announcement, promoting swimming lessons and water safety, was aired repeatedly in the early mornings to catch waves of people heading out to work. On the day we spoke in her studio, Moto-Fincher and station producer Hugo López were putting the finishing touches on a 20-minute video about Vamos a Nadar (Let's Swim), a Spanish-language swimming program for children, which also includes water-safety training for parents. It is offered by the Red Cross and the Sonoma County Regional Parks and Recreation Department.

Moto-Fincher's KDTV program, Retrato Hispano, airs Mondays from 2 a.m. to 5 a.m., when fieldworkers are most likely to tune in. By 4 a.m. their workday is already under way. She has watched groups of them "wearing lights, headlamps, you know, on their hats--to pick the grapes. . . ." If they see just a few minutes of the program before leaving for work, "just one thing like grabbing a branch, that is something in the moment they can remember and maybe survive."

The video on Vamos a Nadar is a creative outgrowth of the Sonoma County Water Safety Committee's concern about the drownings. This committee was formed in the early 1990s, bringing together representatives of the Red Cross, State Parks, local public swimming pools, city governments, County Regional Parks, and the Coastal Conservancy. One of the first products was the Russian River Access Guide, published in Spanish and English, which highlighted ten beach access points and detailed river dangers. Bilingual warning signs were also installed at key places on the river, and press releases were distributed at the beginning of the swimming season to warn about the risks.

Rosiris Guerra and Bert Whitaker, members of the Water Safety Committee, designed the Vamos a Nadar and Vamos a Ser Salvavidas (Let's Be Lifeguards) outreach and training programs in hopes of effecting a cultural shift in the Spanish-speaking community. The goal is to raise awareness of river hazards and build desire to learn how to swim and use water safety skills. Since 2004, the programs have been coordinated: Children take swimming lessons while parents receive rescue skills training, and teens train to become lifeguards.
"We need long-term solutions," said Guerra, who now chairs the committee. "If the parents don't think it is important, they won't do it. If the kids don't learn, they won't know."

Social Marketing
As I learned more about the Red Cross programs, I came to see how they fit with the concept of social marketing developed by Philip Kotler and Gerald Zaltman in the 1970s. Social marketing uses traditional marketing skills to promote behavioral change, and has been adopted internationally by nongovernmental organizations and public agencies seeking to combat disease, promote better nutrition, prevent smoking, and encourage such practices as recycling and local watershed stewardship. The purpose of marketing is to create desire for a product, without regard to the perceived cost of its acquisition. In the Sonoma effort, the "product" is a belief within the Hispanic community that it is important to know how to swim and be able to save lives.

Experience here and abroad has shown that signs and leaflets are not enough. Accidents occur even where water dangers are well marked. Knowing a risk exists is not necessarily enough to motivate a person to behave differently. The risks of many popular vices, such as speeding, overeating, or smoking, are well known, for example, but that does not keep people from continuing to indulge. One thing that can make an impression deep enough to change behavior is experience--either a frightening experience of one's own or the personal story of someone else's.

In the KDTV studio, Fincher cued up their current work-in-progress. On the video screen, a graduate of Vamos a Nadar translated into Spanish as Michelle Wilder told a group of Hispanic parents how her teenaged son drowned in the river in May 2005. (See www.apebbleinthepond.org for more on Wilder.) The parents were visibly moved. Their children were at a swimming lesson as they listened.

The video cut to a young Latina in a red sweatshirt, Jenira Chang, a graduate of Vamos a Ser Salvavidas, who now works as a lifeguard and leads classes for the Red Cross. She too had a story: her uncle drowned in the river.

No One Knew How to Swim
I met Chang early one summer Sunday morning at the Finley Aquatic Center in Santa Rosa, where she was working as a lifeguard during the summer before her senior year in high school. "You have to be realistic," she said. "You go to the river and have fun. People say, ‘Oh, it's hot. Let's go to the river.' People are not going to go start buying lifejackets to go in the river. But people need to understand what could happen." As she spoke, her eyes scanned the swimmers in the pool. I asked her to speak of her uncle.

"I was nine or ten years old. My mom, my aunt, a couple other relatives and my uncle went to the river. We had carne asada," Chang said, glancing at me to see if I knew the dish. "It was around 4 p.m. We always go around noon and stay until about 6 or 6:30 p.m. I had just been pulled out by my brother, because I didn't know how to swim and I was going down the river.

"The tree had a little thing in it you could hang off." "A rope swing?" I asked. "Yeah. And there was a little current. Once you got out of it you were okay. But then when my uncle went off the thing in the tree--I guess he just got caught in that current and that was it. No one knew how to swim, we couldn't do anything."

"Could anything have changed what happened the day with your uncle?" I asked. "Maybe if there was a sign in Spanish or with pictures?"

"Pictures help, but not very much," Chang said. "But if we had known there were underwater currents, if we had known that was dangerous, the adults would have said, ‘No, you can't go in there anymore.'"

Jenira Chang's family had gone to one of many spots on the river that is not a lifeguarded park. It is a common thing to do along the Russian River, some stretches of which are managed by local government, while others are private property. Where there is a rope swing on a bend in the river, you can figure that someone put it up with the intention of swimming and playing there, regardless of whether it is signed private property or not signed at all. What isn't so apparent is that conditions change rapidly, banks are slippery, and the bottom is unpredictable. A place that is safe to swim on one day may be treacherous on another, even with little rain.

Alcohol and Water Don't Mix
In search of local thoughts about safety on the river, I visited Sonoma County's Veterans' Memorial Beach and met lifeguard Kevin Dowdey. Were everyone to go to this beach, which Dowdey supervises with up to seven others during peak periods, drowning statistics would change dramatically. The United States Lifesaving Association www.usla.org estimates the chances of drowning on a beach with lifeguards on duty to be less than one in 18 million.

Dowdey pointed to a boundary rope that is staked out in the water parallel to the bank all along the beach, showing where the depth reaches four feet. Non-swimmers must not cross this line into deeper water. A summer dam constructed by the county slows the current and provides a safe, well-monitored recreational beach for people of all ages to enjoy.

"If we see anyone we're concerned about, we check it out," Dowdey said. "Parents must keep their children within arms" reach. We've been called in to help rescue people. Things happen, often outside the area of our beach." He gave me a copy of the Russian River Access Guide and encouraged me to tell people about the U.S. Lifesaving Association.

The ten river access points highlighted in the Guide provide a kind of security that many of those most at risk of drowning may want to avoid, including a prohibition on alcohol and dawn-to-dusk hours of operation under close watch of lifeguards. The unguarded banks of the river will continue to draw those who want to drink or avoid having to pay fees ($5 per vehicle at some sites).

Further along the river in Healdsburg, I met two young men from Oaxaca. In Spanish they told me they had been living and working in Petaluma, doing construction, for the past eight years. They believe most people from Mexico know how to swim, as they do, and said it is the people who can't swim who have problems. According to the coroner's statistics, at least a quarter of the Hispanics who drowned in the river over the past six years were known to be poor swimmers or nonswimmers.

As we talked, three young men beyond the park's fence were swinging from a rope tied under a bridge and jumping into the water. I caught up with them as they were about to leave. Through the fence they'd scaled to reach the swing, they told me they had learned to swim in the river with their families and only went into the water when conditions were good. They were community college students who grew up nearby, and they never knew anyone who had drowned in the river. When I asked why there were drownings every year, they looked at one another and said, as if stating the obvious, "Accidents happen when people are drinking. People do something stupid." Coroner's statistics confirm that regardless of ethnicity or language, in roughly half of all the drownings in Sonoma County in 2000-2006, alcohol was involved.

I winced when, on the way down Route 116, in Rio Nido, I saw a "Beach" sign with an arrow pointing toward the river sharing a post with another sign that reads "Liquor Store." The post is in a liquor store parking lot. Alcoholic drinks are even sold at the refreshment stand at this private beach.

Getting the Message Out
The county water safety Committee issues bilingual press releases about the dangers of drinking while swimming. The swimming outreach, however, focuses on building survival skills. In terms of the "4 P's" of marketing, "product, price, places, and promote," the task on the Russian River may be seen as marketing the product of swimming and water-survival skills, while minimizing the price of learning to swim or avoiding risks in the river. The Vamos a Nadar programs are inviting members of the Spanish-speaking community to take advantage of swimming lessons for children at reduced cost, offering water-safety training for their parents, and free lifeguard job training for teens to promote the desire to use newly acquired skills in the community. Program partners are working with Spanish-speaking swimming and lifeguard program graduates to promote these skills through Spanish-language media, such as KBBF radio and KDTV 28, and by reaching out to people in places where they live, study, and work.

"It was Rosiris who told me," said Jenira Cheng. "She was at a table at school during a health fair. She told me there were scholarships and that I could get paid. I wanted to learn to swim after my uncle [drowned] but I didn’t know. It was never even in my mind to become a lifeguard, but I talked with Rosi. We spoke in Spanish and then English; she told me about the program. They taught me how to swim. The teacher was really patient, and now I have been working as a lifeguard." Rosiris’s outreach and encouragement led Jenira to believe she could make an impact in the community by sharing her experience, doing public speaking and trainings, working as a lifeguard, and serving as a role model.

Could Jenira’s uncle have been saved if someone who didn’t swim, or who swam poorly, had jumped into the water? Rosiris Guerra is emphatic: Without the necessary skills, trying to save others from drowning can get you killed. "There are reports of Good Samaritans dying after jumping in to try to save someone," she said. An article in the August 15, 2006, issue of the New York Sun reported that a Marine just home from Iraq, a mother, and another family member all died while attempting to rescue a four-year-old child who was caught in an undertow in a river outside Chicago. The child was rescued farther down the river.

"We’re trying to get the message out to people--there are things you can do to help save someone without going into the river yourself," Guerra said. For example, an empty Styrofoam cooler can be thrown into the water as a lifesaver, or a beach umbrella or branch can be held out over the water for the swimmer to grab. Rosiris Guerra, Jenira Chang, and Maria Moto-Fincher all have similar parting messages: Even if people can just learn this, it could save them: "Throw--Don’t Go!"

The Russian River safety program is not free of charge, by design. "If it is free, people may not even come," Guerra explained. Incentives include an additional two-week session of swimming lessons for $15 (a 75 percent discount) for graduates. Between 2004 and 2005, 200 children and 300 Hispanic parents have completed Vamos a Nadar. The pilot program for Vamos a Ser Salvavidas had a first class of five prospective lifeguards in 2005 and anticipates reaching the program capacity of 15 students. The 57-hour lifeguard training is provided on a scholarship that covers the full $250 cost and prepares graduates to complete the Red Cross lifeguard certification. Swimming lessons in Spanish for adults are being planned, and additional languages may also be possible.

Although spring is months away, planners in Sonoma County are getting ready. Moto-Fincher intends to air a longer piece on bilingual outreach and promoting the desire to learn survival skills, and the programs will soon begin recruiting. With their hard work, perhaps 2007 will bring fewer tragedies along the Russian River.

Deborah Hirst, a Coastal Conservancy project manager, has been driving her brother’s beat-up old pickup truck along the Russian River and up the Sonoma Coast since joining the Conservancy in February 2006.