Lifeguard Janet Fash swims in political deep end in Queens

Janet Fash sweeps her hand across the beach of Beach 96th St. one of six bays of Rockaway where she is a lifeguard chief.

“Look at my bay,” she says. “It’s always crowded. This bay and Beach 116th, where the teenage girl drowned this summer, are the busiest bays in Rockaway. The public parking lot is across the street. The lifeguard shack, public bathrooms, concession stand are here. But on most days in the scariest summer in years I have just two lifeguards. This is beyond bureaucratic incompetence. This is dangerous. Bordering on criminal ….”

This was last week, at 11 a.m. and Janet Fash paused to point east one bay.

“Now look at the next beach,” she says. “Half as crowded. They have four lifeguards.”

“How come?” I ask.

Fash laughed, a dark chortle echoing out of the murky depths of the city’s permanent government.

“Because I dared to tell the truth about how dangerous the lifeguard situation is in Rockaway in the pages of the Daily News,” she says. “This is how my bosses get even. The six bays Janet Fash oversees from Beach 96th to Beach 102nd Sts. get two lifeguards per chair. My bosses will tell you they staff the beaches by state guidelines of one lifeguard for every 50 yards. That’s CYA time. Because an addendum to the state guideline says that when there’s a higher bather load – bigger crowd – we will provide more lifeguards. But they don’t. Period. So what are they waiting for? A lawsuit? For me to have a drowning?”

Fash says her bosses also refuse to take variables like rip currents, weather and choppy seas into account.

“They are playing with public safety in a summer when the waters of Rockaway are more dangerous than they’ve been for years,” says this woman who has rescued hundreds of people from these waters. “We’ve already had one drowning. And August is always the worst month for drownings because of the storms.”

Fash has been blowing a lifeguard whistle on Rockaway Beach for 25 years. Two years ago she decided to become a whistleblower in this space about the bureaucratic incompetence and Tammany Hall tactics of the city’s lifeguard service, run like a fiefdom by the sea by two men named Richie Sher and Peter Stein who were appointed during the John Lindsay administration.

These men have never returned any of my numerous phone calls since.

“I’m not saying the drowning of that girl this summer could have been prevented,” Fash says. “The ocean is the ocean. For the last few years it’s been like a lake here. But this summer the rip currents have been wicked. On my bays alone my lifeguards have probably done 150 preventive measures and 50 rescues. My beaches have been dredged, rearranging the sandbars, creating underwater tunnels which cause the rip currents. On these bays we get mostly DFDs – people Down for the Day. Most are not great swimmers. Many can’t swim at all. These are the people who need lifeguards most ….”

Fash takes lunch and drives me down to Belle Harbor, the affluent end of Rockaway. “The people here are what we call ’swimmers,’” she says. “These people were basically baptized in these waters. They grow up knowing how to ride a rip current. Yet down here, where the beaches are a quarter as populated as mine, they have four and five lifeguards per bay.”

Plus, she points out, instead of placing the lifeguard chair smack in the middle of each bay, away from the dangerous jetties where rip currents form, the lifeguard chairs are placed in front of the jetties.

“The lifeguard chairs are magnets,” Fash says. “A young mother brings her child to the shore and she swims closest to the lifeguard chair. But that’s the place where it’s most dangerous. They also don’t use a red and green flag system like in Long Beach that prohibits swimming by the jetties with a red flag and permits swimming only inside the green flags in the center of the bay. When I look at this I want to cry because it’s an invitation to disaster….”

Down at the eastern, and less affluent, end of the Rockaways from Beach 25th to Beach 72nd Sts. there is only one beach open at Bay 59. “If you live in the housing projects of Far Rock you have to walk 20 blocks to find an open beach with a lifeguard,” Fash says. “The city will say it’s to preserve the piping plovers but that doesn’t prevent the city from keeping open the beaches for the endangered birds in Breezy Point or Neponsit or Belle Harbor.”

When we arrive at Beach 25th St. there is only one lifeguard on duty. And he’s the only one until Beach 59th. Every other bay is closed.

Shameful.

Back at Beach 96th, Janet Fash goes back to work after lunch.

“I stopped worrying about retaliation a long time ago,” Fash says. “I can handle it. But the public should be aware that if they come to my crowded bays, from Beach 96th to Beach 102nd, they will only be served by two lifeguards.”

In the scariest summer in years.

By Denis Hamill

Daily News