Defibrillator in a marina: obligations and best practices

A marina hosts hundreds of boats, pontoons, a harbour office and often a sailing or rowing club. Users combine intense physical effort, cold exposure and sometimes alcohol around their outings, three factors that raise the risk of cardiac arrest. Drowning can also trigger a cardiac arrest through lack of oxygen, which makes resuscitation even more urgent.

On a pontoon or a slipway, emergency services often take longer to arrive than in a town centre, slowed down by road access, locked gates or the layout of the site. Each minute without defibrillation reduces survival chances by about 10 percent, a figure that matters when the ambulance still has to reach the farthest quay. An AED (automated external defibrillator) placed near passing points partly compensates for this distance.

The harbour office, the clubhouse or the training room of a water sports centre are establishments open to the public (ERP, the French term for premises receiving the public) and therefore fall under the same framework as any such venue. Categories 1 to 3 have had to be equipped with a defibrillator since 1 January 2020, category 4 since 2021, and some category 5 establishments since 2022, under loi 2018-527 and its décret 2018-1186. The quays and pontoons themselves are not classified as a building, but nothing stops the harbour manager from installing an accessible device there, something more and more marinas now choose to do.

Once the device is installed, registering it in the GéoDAE database is mandatory, regardless of the harbour's status. This listing lets emergency services locate the nearest available device when a call comes in. Signage must follow the arrêté du 29 novembre 2018, with a sign visible from the marina's pedestrian routes, including from floating pontoons.

Salt-laden air, humidity and sea spray speed up wear on electronic equipment. An outdoor cabinet built to withstand these conditions protects the unit far better than a simple indoor wall mount, especially if the defibrillator needs to stay accessible around the clock near the harbour office or a main pontoon.

If the marina hosts a sailing school or a children's activity centre, paediatric pads must complement the adult kit. The choice between a semi-automatic and a fully automatic model mainly depends on who will use it: a semi-automatic device suits trained teams such as instructors, while an automatic model makes it easier for an untrained boat owner acting alone.

The daily self-test remains the best indicator that the device is working, but by the sea it deserves a more frequent visual check of the casing, seals and mounting, since corrosion progresses faster than further inland. Maintenance remains the responsibility of the harbour operator under article R. 5212-25 of the Code de la santé publique (French public health code), which provides no exception for sites exposed to sea spray.

The replacement schedule for consumables does not change with the harbour's location, but it must be followed rigorously, since a salty environment does not forgive neglect. The table below summarises the lifespans to monitor.

Harbour office staff, sailing instructors, lifeguards and maintenance crews are the first people concerned by training in life-saving gestures. A short refresher, repeated periodically, is enough to remove the hesitation to use an AED and to recall what to do when drowning is followed by cardiac arrest.

Boat owners and occasional visitors cannot all be trained, but an automatic defibrillator talks any bystander through the process, trained or not. Clearly displaying its location and mentioning it at the club's season opening meetings strengthens the whole harbour community's reflexes.