Inflatable pools can be big, but so can the risks

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Inflatable pools can be big, but so can the risks

They can be the perfect antidote for a hot summer day: supersize inflatable pools, big enough for adults to swim in or even play water volleyball.They’re cheap — just a couple hundred dollars for a pool that’s 12 feet in diameter, or $500 for a 12-by-20 pool that’s 4 feet deep. And they’re relatively easy to set up, taking less than an hour to get ready for water. No wonder such retailers as Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Target and Toys R Us have loaded their shelves with them.

But a growing number of safety experts say consumers are not factoring in the cost of keeping those grown-up kiddie pools safe. These soft-sided watering holes are no different than real pools and should be surrounded by a fence to keep young children away, safety experts say. And the water needs to be kept clean as well, necessitating pumps, filters and chemicals."As a whole, these are an unsafe product," said Donald Mays, senior director for product safety at Consumers Union, the publisher of Consumer Reports.

The magazine recently issued a safety alert about these pools, as did Good Housekeeping and the Insurance Information Institute, a trade group for the insurance industry.

Unlike kiddie pools, which are usually emptied after each use, supersize pools — a 12-by-20 pool, 4 feet high, can hold as much as 4,313 gallons — would be inconvenient to drain between swims. Many come with filters to encourage water retention.Safety officials say any pool not drained after each use — even those only 2 feet high — should be surrounded by a 4-foot fence with a self-closing gate. But that requirement would make these pools, which range in price from $50 to $750, cost-prohibitive.

"The inflatable pool has the same issue as any pool, and that is, it is an especially fatal attraction to young children," said Mark Ross, a spokesman for the Consumer Product Safety Commission.This summer, at the request of safety-standard-setting organization ASTM International, the commission staff held a meeting with safety advocates and manufacturers to discuss concerns and possible solutions. Retailers were invited but didn’t show up.

"No one came up with a viable solution," said Mays, who is co-chairing an ASTM task force to see if voluntary industry safety standards can be developed.As much as price, the manufacturers stress the ease of setup. One brand, for example, is sold as the Family Quick Pool, another as Easy Set. No digging or sand is required, just level ground. Often sold with air pumps, these pools can be inflated within minutes, the packages all say.

In most stores, there are few, if any, cautionary notices that fences may be required by local laws. The pool manufacturers note that they put such advice on their packages. But a quick scan of several pool boxes shows that these warnings are typically at the bottom, in far smaller print than the promotional information. Manufacturers also say they include safety warnings in the instruction manuals and videotapes that come with the pools.That’s little reassurance to Carol Pollack-Nelson, a human-factors psychologist and independent safety consultant who is co-chair of the ASTM task force. "People often refer to instruction manuals only to extent they need to use the product," she said. "That means they won’t read it from cover to cover, and therefore it’s very likely they won’t see any warnings or any information about local codes" requiring fences around pools.

Most area municipalities have laws mandating fences around pools. In Medford, for example, the requirement is that any body of water deeper than 18 inches be surrounded by a fence.Children under 5 are "most susceptible to accidental drowning because (they) don’t understand the danger a pool poses," said CPSC spokesman Ross.But not everyone thinks requiring fencing is the way to go. Only a dozen children have drowned in inflatable pools since 2001, according to the CPSC.

"That’s not a lot of incidents, which leads me to believe, is there really a problem?" asked Carvin DiGiovanni, head of International Aquatic Foundation, a nonprofit standard- setting organization for the pool industry. The best protection, he added, is "constant, competent adult supervision."Pollack-Nelson, however, said in many cases, the young children who have drowned have been out of sight less than five minutes and were in the care of one or both parents at the time.Last month, a 2? -year-old boy drowned in an inflatable pool near Olympia, Wash. He had been out of his mother’s sight for about 10 minutes, said Dan Kimball, chief criminal deputy of Thurston County, Wash. The mother said she had taken down the ladder to the pool to prevent the boy from climbing in, but apparently it had been put back up by some neighborhood boys.

Pollack-Nelson noted that the debris and solar covers sold for these pools may exacerbate the drowning risk. Last year, two 9-year-old girls jumped onto a covered inflatable pool 15 feet in diameter. The girls got trapped in the cover, fell into the water and drowned.The growing popularity of these pools will make it difficult to create an acceptable safety standard, acknowledges Mays of Consumers Union. "It will be a technically difficult thing to do without affecting the aesthetics or causing the price to be prohibitively expensive. That’s the fix we’re in."

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