School pool drains being repaired to meet federal safety regulations

Pre-construction demolition work begins this week on Libertyville and Vernon Hills pools.

Pool drains are being repaired to meet federal safety regulations requiring drains that won’t trap swimmers under water.

Libertyville’s pool was drained over the weekend and the pool in Vernon Hills was scheduled to to be drained Wednesday.

The high school pools were among about 400 public pools and hot tubs statewide that had not yet complied with the law, according to Illinois Department of Public Health officials.

Pool Drains are very dangerous! This story from several years back illustrates the point!

The police officer’s incident report quoted in The Miami Herald read, “As I approached the man, I could see his pants were down to his knees, and his penis was stuck in a suction pipe located on the north side of the hotel’s swimming pool.” This was not your standard hotel pool mishap, but it certainly qualified as my type of story.

I immediately abandoned all previous column research and began to investigate. The resulting column, “Was hotel liable in bizarre pool mishap?” was published 10 years ago (H&MM 9/6/94) and became my most celebrated and reprint-requested column ever. On this 10th anniversary, I found a compelling if not entirely tasteful reason to revisit the event.

Questions such as, “Whatever happened to that guy who stuck his ‘thing’ into the pipe?” still hound me at conferences and industry events. The usual follow-up question is, “Did he sue the hotel?”

Here is the “official” story, as I recall.

At 4:45 a.m. on July 15, the hotel’s lone front-desk associate was notified of an emergency situation at the swimming pool. Because the employee was properly trained not to leave the front-desk cash drawer area alone or vulnerable, he wisely and immediately called 911.

Upon arrival, the police found a man (we’ll just call him “Bob”) attached to the pool in a less-than-casual fashion. They turned off the swimming pool pump, but that wasn’t quite enough to break up this. ... alliance. “We’re going to need Fire Rescue,” the police announced. And whatever hotel guests were not first awakened and distracted by the sounds of the police arrival now were rudely alerted to join the spectacle by the oncoming sirens. Poor Bob, flat against the pool’s wall, now had a sizeable audience.

Sorry to be the bummer here but:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Abigail_Taylor

Description of the incident

On June 29, 2007, Abigail Taylor’s parents took her to the Minneapolis Golf Club in St. Louis Park, Minnesota. Everyone was leaving the wading pool when Abigail Taylor accidentally fell on the open drain of the pool and her buttocks were sucked into the aperture. The suction dislodged a large section of her small intestine which was forcefully drawn out through the anus, a phenomenon known as transanal evisceration.

The incident was similar to a 1993 incident in North Carolina involving Valerie Lakey, who was five years old at the time. The pool drains in question in the Taylor and Lakey cases were manufactured by Sta-Rite, a division of Minnesota-based Pentair.[2]
Aftermath

The incident has been described by some media reports as a “freak accident”.[3] However, the risk of this sort of accident has been published before in the United States,[4] and cases in other countries have also been documented.[5] Furthermore, Abigail’s parents alleged that the golf club “was aware of the serious risk to swimmers in the kiddie pool [...] but did not take action to eliminate that risk”. They also alleged that the manufacturer of the drain outlet was aware of the potential risk, but failed to issue adequate warnings. The family filed suit against both parties.[6]
Injury and subsequent death

Abigail lost 6.5 meters (21 feet) of her small intestine in the accident, leaving her with short bowel syndrome. Following the accident, Abigail was hospitalized and received a rare triple organ transplant to replace her small intestine, liver, and pancreas, all of which were damaged in the accident. She was unable to eat or drink, and she required total parenteral nutrition. Abigail died nine months after the accident because of a transplant-related cancer. She was six years old at the time of her death.

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