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The First Big Splash!
Playing It Safe With Super-sized Backyard Pools and Babies
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."
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