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Maryland Center For School Safety

Waterbodies near Schools

Welcome to the New MCSS Website!

MCSS is excited to provide you with a new viewing experience. You will be able to access all of the old content in addition to new and expanded items. Any webpage concerns can be directed to [email protected]. 

Maryland Waterbodies Near Schools 

The Maryland Waterbodies Near Schools program offers this interactive mapping application developed through a collaborative effort between the Maryland Center for School Safety (MCSS) and the Risk Analyst team from the Maryland Department of Emergency Management (MDEM). With drowning ranking as the second leading cause of accidental injury death for children aged 5 to 14, pinpointing local water hazards ahead of time is vital for school safety and emergency planning.

To address this vulnerability, the tool integrates precise school campus locations with advanced geospatial waterbody data, mapping out and ranking nearby risks such as rivers, streams, lakes, and retention ponds. This centralized platform equips school administrators, emergency planners, and first responders with the real-time insights needed to proactively manage aquatic risks. By utilizing this tool, stakeholders can enhance their emergency operations plans, conduct fast, targeted searches of surrounding water features, and significantly improve situational awareness during incidents involving missing or at-risk individuals.

Water Safety by the Numbers

For children with developmental disabilities such as autism, elopement (wandering away from a safe, supervised environment) is a frequent and life-threatening emergency. Roughly half of all children with autism attempt to elope at some point. Alarmingly for educational professionals, nearly one-third of these wandering incidents occur from a school setting. When these students wander, they frequently encounter hazards such as roads and waterbodies, which can have devastating consequences. Drowning is the second leading cause of unintentional injury death for children aged 5 to 14.  Children with special needs are at a substantially heightened risk of unintentional injury, including drowning. Children with autism are 160 times more likely to die from drowning than the general pediatric population. In 2025 alone, accidental drowning accounted for 87% of all autism-related wandering fatalities.

  • 71%

    of elopement-related fatalities are drownings.
  • 1/3rd

     of all elopement incidents occur from a school setting. 

In these emergencies, time is a critical factor. Nearly half of the lethal outcomes in wandering cases involve a search time of an hour or less. Because survival depends on immediate intervention, emergency protocols like "Search Water First" from the National Autism Safety Council dictate that first responders and school staff must prioritize searching nearby ponds, pools, and drainage ditches as soon as a child is found to be missing.  To do this effectively, first responders need immediate access to local spatial data. Natural water bodies are a known risk, but man-made retention ponds are an exceptionally severe and frequently overlooked hazard. Ponds accounted for nearly half (48%) of the elopement drowning fatalities in 2025. These stormwater basins are incredibly dangerous because the vast majority lack fences, barriers, or warning signs, and they are highly prevalent in communities.

Click the Map Title to launch the app in a separate window.

Contact:

Questions regarding the Mapping Tool please contact: Sarah Mikkelsen (MDEM)

Questions regarding the program, please contact: Jeyan Jebaraj (MCSS)