It happens quietly, without shouts or screams. Often there’s only a barely audible splash.
A child slips under the water of a residential swimming pool, and no one notices.
It happens a couple of thousand times each year to children younger than age 5 in the United States. It happens even to careful families. About 300 times, the children die. Another 2,000 times the children are injured, some of them debilitated by brain damage.
Swimming pools are just big, wet magnets to small children, who can’t understand their danger. That’s why safety advocates say it’s important to take measures that thwart even the most determined child’s access to a pool–and then thwart it again and again.
They’re called layers of protection, series of measures designed to buy time so an adult can discover a child headed for danger before he or she gets there.
At Fran and Jack Doll’s house in Bath, Ohio, the layers include a motorized safety cover they installed for their back-yard swimming pool. The Dolls are so concerned with safeguarding their 10 grandchildren that they don’t even go into the house without closing the cover, Jack Doll says. “We paid a lot of money for it, but boy, it’s worth every penny,” he says.
The Dolls also insist on swimming lessons for the grandchildren, and they never leave the kids unattended. They put into practice the advice safety advocates push: The most important pool safety tool is watchful adults. “We always say the primary precaution is supervision,” says Patty Hulbert, manager of communications for the National Spa & Pool Institute.
Still, supervision isn’t foolproof. At some point even the most vigilant caregivers are bound to take their eyes off a child, be it in the midst of a distraction or the middle of the night.
When it happens, layers of protection can serve as backups to keep a mistake from turning into tragedy.
The layer that most safety experts cite first is a fence, preferably one that encloses the pool completely so it’s separated from the house. “A lot of people put up a fence and just fence three sides … so kids can wander right out” of the house, says Mark Harper, president of both the Ohio and Summit County Safe Kids coalitions and a public education specialist with the Akron (Ohio) Fire Department. A four-sided fence, on the other hand, safeguards the pool owner’s children or visitors as well as the youngsters in the neighborhood.
One option, particularly for homes with three-sided fences, is an additional removable fence such as the mesh version made by Life Saver Pool Products in Orange County, Calif. The fence surrounds the pool, its posts mounted into sleeves in the pool deck. It’s designed so little feet can’t get a foothold and children can’t sneak beneath or between the fence sections, says company representative Salli Cline.
All pool fences should be too high and too difficult to scale easily. The National Spa & Pool Institute and the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission say a fence should be at least 4 feet high; the National Safe Kids Campaign recommends 5 feet. Individual communities often have their own regulations.
The gate should close tightly, with no gaps that a child can slip through, Harper says. Self-closing and self-latching mechanisms can help ensure no one leaves a gate open or unlocked accidentally. In addition, pool owners should make sure tables, chairs and other climbable objects are kept away from the fence.
Before a child even gets as far as the pool fence, though, you want to know he might be headed that way. That’s where childproofing the house’s exit doors and windows comes in.
One method that safety experts recommend is a door or window alarm. The type of door alarm that Life Savers sells has a pass-through button, which must be pushed to keep the alarm from sounding within seconds of a door’s opening. The button is mounted at least 54 inches off the floor, out of a little one’s reach.
Similar alarms are available for gates leading to the pool area. Door and gate alarms typically sell for about $30 to $90.
Safety latches
Other options are mounting a lock high on the door, installing two doorknobs that must be turned simultaneously–one in the usual spot, one high on the door–or installing safety latches that are similar in design to the latches designed to keep curious toddlers out of kitchen cabinets.
The latches also are helpful for preventing youngsters from opening a window wide enough to crawl through.
One of the last layers of pool protection is a safety cover, which acts like a pool lid to block access to the water. The Consumer Product Safety Commission recommends choosing a cover that meets the standards of the American Society for Testing and Materials. That means it supports the weight of two adults and a child and is designed so water doesn’t collect on the cover–in itself a drowning hazard to an infant or toddler, Harper points out.
Covers range in cost from about $2,000 for a manual model that has to be dragged on and off the pool to around $4,000 to $6,000 for an automatic cover like the Dolls’. In between are models that operate with hand cranks or levers.
The convenience of the motorized cover made it worth the expense for the Dolls. Because it closes quickly, 1 1/2 minutes, and easily, the family uses it faithfully, Jack Doll says. Covers that are inconvenient or cumbersome are more likely to be ignored, which means they offer no protection at all, Cline points out.
Pool and perimeter alarms are also available as protective measures, but safety advocates are divided on their use. Some recommend the alarms as one layer of protection; others say they’re too prone to false alarms.
Cline points out that alarms that float in a pool can be set off by anything that disturbs the pool’s surface–a fountain, the wind or even the pool’s pump. “They give off so many false alarms that people turn the sensitivity down and down and down” to the point that they’re virtually useless, she says.
Perimeter alarms that operate with infrared light beams are effective, she says, but only under the right circumstances. The beams can’t turn corners and must end in something solid; if not, they’ll shoot off into the neighbor’s yard, where any movement will set them off.
Some perimeter alarm systems use laser beams instead, but those are easily tripped by birds or other passing objects, Cline says.
The safety advocates also recommend having a poolside phone. Besides being essential in an emergency, it’ll eliminate any temptation to leave the kids unattended to run inside and answer a call.
Of course, equip the pool area with first-aid and rescue equipment such as ropes, lifesaving rings and shepherd’s crooks–and just as importantly, equip your family with knowledge of how to use them, Harper says.
When it comes to pool safety, there really is no such thing as being too careful.
There’s no substitute for supervision
– Provide constant adult supervision. One idea is to appoint a “water watcher,” an adult whose only responsibility is watching the children in the pool.
– Require teenagers and adults, including baby sitters, to learn infant and child CPR.
– Post CPR instructions and emergency numbers in the pool area.
– Make swimming off-limits when a sitter in the early teens or younger is in charge.
– Make sure children and others who use the pool take swimming lessons. However, don’t let the lessons lull you into thinking your children need any less supervision.
– Insist that children use the buddy system.
– Keep toys, tricycles and other playthings that might attract tots away from the pool area.
– Prohibit diving unless the pool is at least 9 feet deep, and make sure swimmers learn proper diving techniques.
– Use only approved flotation devices that are the appropriate size for the child. Don’t use them as a substitute for supervision.
– Remove or secure ladders or steps leading to above-ground pools if they’re not enclosed by a fence.
— Knight Ridder/Tribune
