New Pool Safety Laws - lets question the logic behind this!
2011-02-03 19:00:53
The Queensland Government has decided to introduce new safety laws regarding swimming pools - often a 'forgotten' part of a budget - but an area of a project which can often incur substantial costs.
There's no doubt we need regulations around swimming pools, but one has to wonder whether the new regs (along with a host of explanatory diagrams) have been created by a person or department with far too much time on their hands and a complete disconnect from reality.
Here's some information quoted from the information sheet the Queensland Government have published:
Child drownings halved after Queensland introduced swimming pool safety laws in 1991, but we can do better. The latest data shows that:
• drowning is the leading cause of accidental death for children aged one to four years
• the average age for childhood drownings in a pool is two years of age
• between 1 January 2004 and 30 June 2010, 41 children under five years of age drowned in Queensland’s residential swimming pools, as well as one drowning in a wading pool and two in home-made pools.
While these statistics are shocking, what we would like to know is how much 'drilling down' has been done by the authorities that make these regulations to establish the EXACT NATURE of how these kids drowned. It seems bizarre that with an average age of 2 years old, a fence of 1200mm high is going to be the key ingredient for stopping these things from happening - how many 2 years old do you know that could even reach part the way to this height, let along scale up and over it?
'Child' seems to be up to the age of 14-16 depending on where you get your definition from - so if the average age is 2 - then presumably that means the older (and taller) kids arent drowning because they climbed a non- compliant fence.
And in terms of another 'area' where apparently alot of pool fences fail to comply, boundary fences that have climable rails - again how many of the 41 drownings over the six year period they refer to were caused by kids climbing over these types of boundary fences?
Whilst it's all well and good to keep piling regulations on us, their has to be a point surely when the ridiculous nature, and EXTRA expense caused by seemingly superficial attempts to bandaid a problem have to stop. Supervision and teaching kids to swim should be the first priority of any regulators attention.
Pool fencing is one of the areas that often causes plenty of headaches in terms of design - and because the regulations around climbability and height of fences seem to us quite ridiculous at times, we would like to see a more sensible and pragmatic approach to the introduction of these kinds of regulations.
One can only hope...
CLICK HERE to download a PDF info sheet about the new laws.
