unicornnews: Beach charity wants voice

A spokesman for Welsh charity Action Camp has hit out at media coverage of an incident on Tenby beach this weekend in which children on one of the organisation’s camping weekends had to be rescued by lifeguards after a beach-based team building exercise went wrong.

36 children and four adults were taking part in the team building game, which involved walking backwards down a sandbank towards the sea, when the sandbank collapsed, causing some participants to slide into the sea. Fortunately a life guard had already seen the party and was on his way to warn them about the unstable sandbanks as the collapse occurred, meaning a quick life-saving operation could be mounted to rescue those children who had fallen into the sea.

Project organiser Bill Fitzgerald, while admitting some errors may have been made in the planning of the team building game – in particular they’d failed to notice a sign warning people about the unstable nature of the sandbanks – he said that media coverage of the incident exaggerated the risk to his party and the extent of the rescue operation mounted.

While keen to commend the life guards who came to their rescue, he said that a press statement issued by the Royal National Lifeboat Institution claiming they had saved forty people made the story seem bigger than it really was, and fed a news media hungry to lead with ‘forty people saved from near death’ stories.

According to PR Week, Fitzgerald insists only six children were out of their depth after falling into the sea, and says he is keen to communicate to the press that, without wanting to take anything away from the bravery and skills of rescue workers, a risk assessment undertaken by the charity prior to the weekend also helped ensure the accident wasn’t more serious than it turned out to be.

PR Week quote Fitzgerald as saying: “There’s been a lot of sensationalism. I can’t believe it’s the second story on Sky News ahead of swine flu and is making international headlines. Only six children went out of their depth when the sandbank collapsed and only two were mildly injured. The RNLI press release claimed they saved 40 people. I’m not taking anything away from the lifeguards, because they were brilliant, but they didn’t need to rescue 40 people”.

He adds that his organisation wasn’t given a chance to communicate its side of the story by news agencies, complaining: “We didn’t get a chance to get our message across. We are being portrayed as irresponsible, as if we hadn’t done any checks”. Fitzgerald and his team had checked there were lifeguards in the vicinity, and that there was an adult for each eight children.

He concludes: “Journalists are nice to you on the phone, but then they try to hang you in the article. The way they edit you makes you sound like you said something you didn’t. There are loads of inaccuracies”.

Action Camp is a Caerphilly-based charity that stages camping weekends for disadvantaged youth from across Wales.

Posted Monday July 27 2009 by Chris Cooke

Related categories: Media Relations