BAY VILLAGE, Ohio — The National Weather Service issued a beach hazard warning for Cuyahoga County and Lorain County on Friday because of high risk rip currents. The Cleveland Metroparks closed their lakefront swimming areas, such as Huntington Beach and Edgewater Beach, because of these poor water conditions. 

Tom Gill with the United States Lifesaving Association said that rip currents are channels of water moving away from the shore and that high winds, like Northeast Ohio is having, cause these rip currents to be even stronger than they usually are. He said rip currents don’t pull people under the water, but they do pull people away from the shore. They become dangerous to swimmers when people try to fight the currents.

“What kills people is people that fight that rip current to exhaustion, people that have no swimming ability at all and get pulled out into deeper waters and people that just panic,” he said.

Gill said that rip currents are the number one issue that they see when they guard beaches across the country on a daily basis. His advice is to stay calm.

“Don’t fight, float," he said. "Save your energy. If you’re able to, start swimming laterally until you’re no longer being pulled out."

Once you’ve done that, you should be able to get to safety.

“You’re either going to land onto a sandbar or you’re going to find you’re in sort of the area where the waves are still breaking and pushing and you can let those push you back into the shoreline,” he said.

Huntington Beach had signs and flags that said “No Swimming” as well as lifeguards on duty to prevent people from getting in the water. The beach hazard warning ends Saturday morning.