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Anyone who uses a wheelchair – or pushes one for someone – realizes that sand is the enemy.
It’s summer and whether you can run to the water or use a wheelchair, we all want to enjoy going to the beach during the precious few months of nice weather.
Sand, when combined with the narrow wheels of a wheelchair, the weight of a person in it, and the wrong centre of gravity, creates the ultimate sand trap. The only way to bring a person to the beach and the water is to either use brute strength to pull the chair backwards to where you want to go or – and this all depends on the size of the person – carry them to the water’s edge.
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But times are changing and there is one beach in Atlantic Canada – Inverness Beach – which wants to become an accessibility leader and make it the most inclusive beach in the Maritimes.
And it’s good to know that Gimli, right here in our province, isn’t far behind.
Earlier this month, CBC News in Nova Scotia reported that the Inverness Development Association and the Inverness County Accessibility Committee got together and bought two beach-friendly wheelchairs as well as mats and two floating chairs.
The two wheelchairs are beach-friendly because of one reason – or maybe because of four reasons. The wheels.
The wheels on a beach wheelchair are big balloon tires – think of it as converting a wheelchair into your own personal dune buggy. While the person using the beach wheelchair can’t actually self propel these chairs, they are easy for family members or attendants to push a person across the sand to the water.
What they aren’t good for is going in the water.
Enter the floating chairs.
These chairs, which look like a lounger chair, not only have three balloon tires, but the arm rests double as floats. The end result is once they are in the water, a person can push the chair from behind through the water, making it extremely easy for a person living with a physical disability to experience being in water at a beach.
You’d think they wouldn’t need the helpful warning label, telling people not to use a boat to pull the chair, but I’m sure the label was put on after someone did it.
As for the mats, these special recycled polyester portable sidewalks can be laid down on top of sand to allow people using wheelchairs, or even seniors using walkers or with other mobility issues, to get down to the water.
“For years I sat up on the boardwalk,” Callum MacQuarrie, who was paralyzed from the neck down in a diving accident on Inverness Beach more than two decades ago. told CBC.
“I’m still a beach bum, but I’m not on the beach. But now I can be.”
Much the same way, three years ago Gimli tried accessing a federal grant to purchase the same mats Inverness Beach just bought.
Gimli Mayor Randy Woroniuk said this week when that funding didn’t come, the municipality just went out and bought two of the mats themselves. Each 10-metre segment costs $2,500.
Woroniuk said this year they are looking at buying a piece of playground equipment, to help children using wheelchairs, as well as one of the same floating chairs that Inverness Beach bought.
“We have to be cognizant of the fact not everybody can use their two legs to get to the beach,” he said.
“It all began for me when a girl in a wheelchair asked me to come for a walk with her. I saw the shortcomings in our community. That’s what galvanized this.”
Woroniuk said he hopes the municipality will be able to loan the floating chair to one of the beach equipment rental businesses for the season to rent them out to people for free.
And Woroniuk said the community will continue to set aside money, as its budgets allow, to purchase more accessible equipment in future.
“At last year’s film festival I saw a woman I know. Her husband has used a wheelchair for years. She said when he saw the mats he was thrilled. He was able to get right to the water for the first time in a long time.
“To me, it is a small thing, but for them, it was a big thing… and in future we will be a more inclusive beach.
“Congratulations to the people out east – we should all be like that.”
And, with all of these devices, sand can go from being the enemy to being a friend of people living with disabilities.
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