The First Big Splash!

Playing It Safe With Super-sized Backyard Pools

By Laura Cone

When Don Mays was a child, his mother would inflate a small swimming pool and fill it up with water for him to cool off during the summer. Just as fast-food restaurants came out with "biggie" and "super-sized" portions, backyard pools have grown. And super-sized pools can be more harmful than junk food if parents don't take the proper precautions.

Mays, the senior director for product safety and consumer science for Consumer Reports magazine in Yonkers, N.Y., says inexpensive backyard pools have grown to hold much more water than the pool his mother would empty out after each use. "Now, the inflatable pools have been super-sized," Mays says. "As a result, they have actually increased the risk of drowning."

Mays says Consumer Reports came out with a report on inflatable pools one year ago. He is currently working with government agencies and an industry standard-setting organization to write safety standards for pools. "These new pools now hold anywhere between 500 and 5,000 gallons of water," he says. "The likelihood that people are going to dump them out at the end of the day at the end of use is slim to none. In fact, manufacturers even provide filter pumps, which encourage people to leave them set up all summer long or for extended periods of time in someone's backyard."

According to Mays, most backyard swimming pools cost less than $200. "For that price, the likelihood of somebody installing a fence around that pool that costs 10 times as much as the pool itself is so highly unlikely we don't think people will do it," he says. "And a fence is absolutely imperative to make sure the pool is safe."

Mays points out that many in-ground pools come with pool safety covers that are strong enough to support a child's weight so he or she does not fall through. However, the covers that often come with inexpensive blowup or plastic pools are not safety covers but debris covers.

"The [debris] covers themselves have been responsible for at least two drownings we know of," says Mays, adding two girls jumped on top of a cover acting as if it were a trampoline. "The cover engulfed them and held them under water until they drowned."

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