Every Lake Has a Story. Ours Broke My Heart – And Started Something.

By  Mudra Machewad, Founder, LakeSafe Initiative | Sammamish, Washington 

Some summers stay with you. This one wouldn’t let go.

I was about to start sophomore year at Skyline High School in Sammamish, Washington – a city built around a lake, where summer basically means Lake Sammamish State Park, where families from across the Eastside come to kayak and swim and just be outside together. I had homework and college prep ahead of me. And then August 2025 happened, and none of that felt like enough.

It started a few weeks before the August tragedy. A boat carrying my neighbors unexpectedly flipped on Lake Sammamish. My dad, who doesn’t know how to swim, watched helplessly as the situation rapidly escalated. My mom and my dad were both wearing life jackets that day – and it was my mom, along with a few others nearby, who jumped in and helped pull everyone to safety. Just weeks later, a separate drowning in that same lake deeply impacted our community.

Weeks later, it didn’t end okay. Members of our community drowned in that same lake on August 30. Fathers. Husbands. Men whose wives and children witnessed it happen. The grief that moved through Sammamish was quiet and heavy in a way that’s hard to describe – present in the school hallways, in the neighborhood texts, in the pauses mid-conversation when someone started to bring it up and then didn’t know how to finish. Thousands of people came together to support the families, because that was the only thing anyone knew to do.

I kept thinking about those weeks before. About how helpless it had felt. About how quickly it had escalated – and how differently it could have ended. About life jackets. And I kept coming back to the same question: what if something simple had been different in August? A life jacket within reach. A warning sign in the right language. Someone who knew what to do. Would it have changed anything?

I didn’t know. But I couldn’t just do nothing.

Here’s what I’ve learned since then: drowning is one of the most preventable causes of death we have, and we are still not treating it that way. Globally, it kills around 300,000 people a year. In the U.S., between 3,700 and 4,500 people drown annually – nearly 900 of them children and teenagers. It is the leading cause of unintentional death for kids ages 1 to 4. For every person who drowns, four or five more end up in the emergency room from a near-drowning that nobody hears about. In Washington State, the numbers have been getting worse, not better – unintentional summer drowning deaths rose from 37% to 51% of all drownings between 2018 and 2022. That’s roughly ten preventable deaths a month during peak season, right here in our state.

And most of it happens in open water. Not pools. Lakes, rivers, Puget Sound. In King County, more than half of all drowning deaths over the past seven years were in open water. About 30% of those happened in Lake Washington. The lake that families drive to on a Saturday morning without thinking twice.

There’s one more number that changes the conversation every time I say it: according to King County Public Health, between 60 and 70 percent of drowning deaths in King County involved drugs or alcohol. That means in most cases, the risk wasn’t just about water conditions or swimming ability. It started with a decision made on dry land, before anyone got near the water. Prevention has to start there too.

That’s really what LakeSafe Initiative is about. Not responding after something goes wrong – instead getting there before it does. Multilingual signage at the lake that actually tells people what the hazards are. Life jacket loaner stations so families don’t have to come prepared with equipment they might not own. Rescue gear on the shoreline. Education that meets people where they actually are, not where we wish they were. Research shows that swim instruction can reduce drowning risk by up to 88% – but not every family has equal access to that. Water safety has to reach the people who need it most, in the languages they speak, in the communities they live in.

I started this the same month sophomore year began – September 2025. What followed still surprises me. Washington State Parks, King County Public Health, the Sammamish Community YMCA, Seattle Children’s Hospital, Eastside Fire & Rescue, the Washington State Department of Health, the Issaquah School District, the Washington State Senate, the Cities of Issaquah and Sammamish, the Sammamish Chamber of Commerce, Friends of Lake Sammamish State Park, the Kiwanis Club of Greater Issaquah, Safe Boating Campaign, Influence the Choice, Washington Nonprofits, TEDxSammamish Women – one by one, people and organizations showed up and said yes. Not because someone asked them to. Because the community needed it and they knew it. Together, we’ve connected with over 5,000 people and had more than 2,000 real conversations – not handouts, not booths people walk past, but actual conversations with families about what safety at the lake looks like for them.

“I believe leadership begins with service,” I often say. “The heart to serve, the call to lead, the courage to engage = Service Leadership” But honestly? LakeSafe Initiative didn’t begin with leadership. It began with my dad out on that lake, terrified, not knowing if his neighbors were going to be okay. It began with families that should still be whole.

This May, the community is gathering at Lake Sammamish State Park for LakeSafe Initiative Confluence 2026 – free and open to everyon. Expert conversations, hands-on safety stations, and every organization involved standing up and publicly committing to one concrete action for this summer. Then Lake Safety Awareness Week follows. Because summer is almost here. And we are not willing to spend another August the way we spent the last one.

Looking ahead, the vision is bigger than one lake and one summer. In the coming months, LakeSafe Initiative is working toward permanent multilingual signage and life jacket stations at Lake Sammamish State Park before peak season, expanding its youth ambassador program into more Issaquah School District schools, and deepening its work with public health and marine safety partners across King County. Over the next few years, the goal is to take what’s being built here – the partnerships, the community trust, the prevention model – and bring it to other lakes and communities across Washington State and beyond. Every lake deserves this. Every family does too.

What started here is meant to travel – not because it’s a model, but because the grief is the same everywhere, and so is the possibility of preventing it.

It starts with a conversation. A life jacket in the right place. A family that pauses for a moment before they walk down to the water.

That pause is what we’re working for.

Every Lake. Every Life.

Learn more at lakesafeinitiative.org | Instagram: @lakesafeinitiative | 

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LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/lakesafeinitiative

Media: https://www.fox13seattle.com/video/fmc-dayen59dysee1x8s