OC Beach Patrol Facing Unusual Recruitment Challenges

OCEAN CITY — Increased competition in terms of starting wages and the cost of seasonal housing has created recruitment challenges for the Ocean City Beach Patrol, resort officials learned this week.

During a budget work session on Thursday, April 11, long-time Ocean City Beach Patrol Captain Butch Arbin presented his agency’s fiscal year 2020 spending plan under the larger umbrella of the town’s emergency services department. Through the discussion of the beach patrol budget, which is largely unchanged from last year save for some inflationary increases related to salaries and benefits, it came to light recruitment efforts for the upcoming season has presented challenges for a variety of reasons to the point Arbin is not entirely confident he will start the summer with the optimum number lifeguards, or surf rescue technicians.

“It looks like we’ll have less guards manning less stands on Memorial Day weekend this year as we did last year,” he said.

Arbin described the three basic legs of the Beach Patrol’s three-legged stool as education, in the form of teaching visitors to “keep their feet in the stands until the lifeguards are in the stands,” prevention, or daily seminars on the beach to inform visitors of daily and even hourly changes in ocean conditions, and finally, intervention, which covers a multitude of interactions from pulling swimmers from rip currents to intervening in medical emergencies to locating and reuniting lost children with their families.

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