page_title: Rip current
section_title: Danger to swimmers
hierarchical_section_title: Rip current / Danger to swimmers
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Panneau danger courant baïnes à Montalivet (Gironde, France).
context_page_description: A rip current, often simply called a rip, is a specific kind of water current that can occur near beaches with breaking waves. A rip is a strong, localized, and narrow current of water which moves directly away from the shore, cutting through the lines of breaking waves like a river running out to sea. A rip current is strongest and fastest nearest the surface of the water.
  Rip currents can be hazardous to people in the water. Swimmers who are caught in a rip current and who do not understand what is happening, or who may not have the necessary water skills, may panic, or they may exhaust themselves by trying to swim directly against the flow of water. Because of these factors, rip currents are the leading cause of rescues by lifeguards at beaches, and are the cause of an average of 46 deaths by drowning per year in the United States.
  A rip current is not the same thing as undertow, although some people use the term incorrectly when they are talking about a rip current. Contrary to popular belief, neither rip nor undertow can pull a person down and hold them under the water.
context_section_description: Rip currents are a potential source of danger for people in shallow water with breaking waves, whether this is in seas, oceans or lakes. Rip currents are the proximate cause of 80% of rescues carried out by beach lifeguards.
  Rip currents typically flow at about 0.5 m/s (1.6 ft/s), but they can be as fast as 2.5 m/s (8.2 ft/s), which is faster than any human can swim. However, most rip currents are fairly narrow, and even the widest rip currents are not very wide; usually swimmers can exit the rip easily by swimming at a right angle to the flow, parallel to the beach. But swimmers who are unaware of this fact may exhaust themselves trying unsuccessfully to swim against the flow. The flow of the current also fades out completely at the head of the rip, outside the zone of the breaking waves, so there is a definite limit to how far the swimmer will be taken out to sea by the flow of a rip current.
  In a rip current, death by drowning occurs when a person has limited water skills and panics, or when a swimmer persists in trying to swim to shore against a strong rip current, thus eventually becomes exhausted and drowns.
  According to NOAA, over a 10-year average, rip currents cause 46 deaths annually in the United States, and 64 people died in rip currents in 2013. However, the United States Lifesaving Association "estimates that the annual number of deaths due to rip currents on our nation's beaches exceeds 100."
  A study published in 2013 in Australia revealed that rips killed more people on Australian territory than bushfires, floods, cyclones and shark attacks combined.
caption: A warning sign in France
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