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 Editorials | Issues | April 2007 
Resort Wouldn't Help Us: Family
 Stuart Hunter - The Province
March 30, 2007
| | Tourists beware, warns Kelowna doc, whose father died swimming in ocean. (CBC) | 
| Heinz Zimmermann, 72, went missing and died while swimming in the waters off an upscale Mexican resort earlier this month. (CBC)
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"They were helpless to help."
Members of a Kelowna family are warning others about the perils of all-inclusive-style resorts in Mexico after they were virtually left to fend for themselves when senior Heinz Zimmermann went missing while swimming near the popular tourist town of Puerto Vallarta.
"I want to help prevent another tragedy from happening down there again," Zimmermann's sombre son Gordon, an anesthesiologist at Kelowna General Hospital, said yesterday. "What's done is done, but if anything positive can come from my father's death, I have to try. He would want me to." The Zimmermanns' nine-member clan - Gordon and his twin brother and their families as well as their parents from Swift Current, Sask. - had been at a five-star resort in Nuevo Vallarta for less than a day when tragedy struck on March 11.
"We were just starting to relax, sitting around the pool, and my father said he was going to go for a swim and to check the ocean out," Zimmermann said, adding that his 72-year-old dad was a strong swimmer and in good shape for his age.
"My brother and I decided to go and look for him, and he went in one direction and I went in the other, but we were both quite shocked when neither found him." As panic set in, the Zimmermanns asked the lifeguard on duty and hotel staff to help but were repeatedly told there was no life-saving equipment at the resort and the Jet-Ski had been broken for two years.
"They didn't even have a life preserver with a ring," recalled Zimmermann. "We started to realize we were on our own here." With darkness looming, the family enlisted the aid of two sailboat owners, who lent them a dinghy and joined in the search for the missing farmer.
Unable to continue their search, owing to darkness, the family asked the hotel manager to call in a military boat and a private helicopter in order to continue the search in the morning.
The next morning, neither the chopper nor boat were anywhere in sight, so Zimmermann demanded they be brought in.
"It was so frustrating," he said. "We felt very alone." About an hour later, the senior's body was spotted from the chopper lying face down in the sea.
A preliminary autopsy indicated Heinz Zimmermann died from a heart attack.
"I hope he just walked into the water and had a heart attack and that was it," Gordon Zimmermann said. "I hope he wasn't out there in the water for hours, struggling." Zimmermann said he was told by Canadian consulate officials in Puerto Vallarta that they have lobbied local hotels to improve water safety.
Honorary Consul Lyne Benoit, contacted yesterday, referred questions to Foreign Affairs in Ottawa, who didn't return calls.
"We don't know what we are authorized by the family to say or not say," Benoit said. "I'm not in a position to make any comment." Zimmermann said he realizes Mexico can't match Canadian safety standards but suggests potential guests check out a resort's safety standards prior to booking a stay.
"They call them all-inclusives, but some don't include safety," he said. "These million-dollar resorts are good at making you feel safe, but it is an ignorant bliss."
shunter@png.canwest.com |
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