A new organization dedicated to making shallow water blackout common knowledge, ending a preventable form of drowning that claims lives without warning.
End Silent Drownings is a new organization in its early stages. Our full website, resources, and programs are actively being developed. What you are seeing now is a placeholder: a signal that something real and meaningful is on its way.
Our goal is to become the definitive resource on shallow water blackout for swimmers, parents, coaches, and policymakers. We intend to close an information gap that costs lives, and to push for this knowledge to be recognized at a legislative level.
If you want to be involved as a volunteer, an advocate, a collaborator, or simply someone who cares, please reach out. This work needs all of us.
A preventable form of drowning that leaves no warning signs, and that most swimmers, coaches, and parents have never heard of. Here is how it happens.
To extend time underwater, swimmers often take rapid, deep breaths first. This is common practice, and it is the trigger. Hyperventilating flushes out carbon dioxide (CO₂) without meaningfully raising oxygen levels.
Here is the counterintuitive part: the urge to breathe is not triggered by low oxygen. It is triggered by rising CO₂. With CO₂ artificially depleted, the brain does not send the alarm. The swimmer feels no distress and no urgency to surface.
Without the breathing signal firing, oxygen continues to fall. When it drops below what the brain needs to stay conscious, the swimmer blacks out underwater: instantly, silently, with no visible struggle from the surface. Without an immediate rescue, drowning follows.
This does not only affect beginners. A Dartmouth Division I swimmer lost his life to this in 2015. A two-time Olympian sank unconscious at the 2022 World Aquatics Championships, saved only because her coach dove in fully clothed. Experience and fitness offer no protection if the mechanism is unknown.
Never hyperventilate before entering the water. Never practice breath-holds or underwater laps alone. Always swim with someone who knows to watch and act. These rules are simple, but they only work when people know to follow them. That is the gap we are closing.
This organization exists because of Enzo: a Dartmouth student, a Mellon Mays scholar, and someone whose life was shaped by a genuine, practical desire to reach the people that institutions tend to overlook.
His academic work centered on access and belonging: expanding ESL programs for immigrant families, weaving music into those spaces so that learning felt welcoming, so that parents did not have to arrange childcare just to show up. He understood, in a personal and precise way, that knowledge withheld from the wrong people causes real harm.
Enzo was careful and responsible. He took lessons. He understood safety. And still, no one had ever mentioned shallow water blackout to him. Nor to a single person around him. That silence is what this organization exists to break.
His family and the people who loved him are building this together. The goal is for his name to be the reason thousands of people learn something that could save their lives: a quiet, lasting reach, exactly the kind he always cared about.
Whether you are a swimmer, a parent, a coach, a researcher, a policy advocate, or simply someone who wants to help, there is a place for you here.