MINNEAPOLIS (AP) _ No one noticed when swimming class ended that 13-year-old Shuai Jiang hadn't shown up on deck.
Nothing appeared wrong to those looking across the high school pool. A teacher and a few students swam extra laps.
But 12 feet below the surface, Shuai's young life was draining out of him. It took almost 20 minutes before a student entering the pool for the next class saw the freshman's body. By then, it was too late.
Two years after Shuai's drowning, the pool where he died is now equipped with an underwater camera system that detects motionless swimmers. The system is designed to spot what lifeguards cannot immediately see.
The St. Cloud public school system is the first in the country to install the drowning detection system, called Poseidon. It sounds an alarm when a swimmer has been immobile for 10 seconds, alerting lifeguards by beeper to a specific area of the pool.
Nearly 14 people drown each day in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Behind motor vehicle deaths, drownings were the second-highest cause of accidental death for youngsters ages 1 to 14, the 1998 statistics show.
In the 10,000-student St. Cloud school system, where swimming is a required part of gym class, the Poseidon system has been installed in all four of the district's pools. The system will not be fully operational until training is complete in a few more weeks.
After Shuai's death, police determined that a water exchanger had caused a cloudy swirl in the pool, and lines painted on the bottom further obscured the view.
A January trial date has been set in the wrongful-death lawsuit filed by the boy's family against the school district. The lawsuit seeks more than $50,000, alleging negligence in operation, supervision and maintenance of the pool.
Today, the pool has digital cameras above it and within its walls. The Poseidon system taps a large computer database of "normal swimming actions" and sounds an alert when an object remains still, said Steve Bagby, president of Vision IQ, the French company that began creating the program five years ago. The security system can differentiate between shadows and objects.
The system gives a grid number to pinpoint where a motionless person is in the pool.
The Poseidon system already is being used in Europe and Canada. Costs start at about $75,000 for a half-Olympic-size pool, which is 25 yards in length.
The safety system, which is nearly invisible to swimmers, is credited by Vision IQ with saving the life of a teen-ager doing pool laps last fall in France.
The Jiang family's attorney, Leo Feeney, said the system probably would have not prevented Shuai's death. "The system doesn't tell you anything until a body is motionless," he said. "By then, it could be too late."
(Copyright 2001 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
APTV 08-31-01 1048MDT
