Houston has already heated up for the summer, and that means a lot of people are heading to the pool. Whether you’re at a public pool or private pool, exercising a bit of caution may prevent you from sustaining a grievous injury or worse. According to a report released by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an average of 390 children between the ages of zero and 14 died in drowning deaths through the period extending between the years 2007 and 2009.
High Risk Groups
According to the report, the highest risk group for drowning deaths are those between the ages of zero and five years old. They constituted 293 of the 390 deaths reported from 2007 2009. This translates to roughly 75 percent of those deaths, according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
Mitigating the risk posed to children by drowning starts with paying attention. Children should not be allowed to go to swimming pools where there is no supervision or where there is no lifeguard on duty. Keep in mind that, even though other well-intentioned parents may be willing to bring your child down to the swimming pool, there still may be a risk to those children that you’re not considering. Unless those well-intentioned parents happen to have first aid training for drowning victims, they may be able to do little for a child who suffers a submersion injury.
Liability and Swimming Pools
In some cases were children or adults are injured at swimming pools, filing a lawsuit might be an option. There are certainly plenty of swimming pools out there that are swim at your own risk affairs. Even though this is the case, it’s still worth it to speak with an attorney if you or your child happens to have been injured at a swimming pool. The best possible thing you can do, however, is to provide your child with the tools they need to stay safe.
Swimming Instruction
When you don’t live next to any large bodies of water, it’s easy to make the mistake of thinking that swimming lessons may be frivolous for children. Remember: even large cities without any recreational lakes or rivers nearby tend to have a lot of houses with swimming pools. Taking a child to a facility that provides qualified instruction in swimming is always a good idea. It may be a skill that they never need to use to save themselves but, if they do, it is literally the difference between life and death.
Make certain that you visit any recreational facility where your child goes to swim so that you can see what kind of a safety culture they have. While an attorney can certainly help you if your child suffers an injury due to negligence on the part of somebody who should’ve intervened or provided a safer environment, the best case scenario is one where you see negligence before it causes injury and where you are able to remove your child from that situation before the worst happens.
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