he police report refers to the 7-year-old girl simply as “Drown Person.”
But cloaked in the anonymity of that field investigation report are the true identity of the victim and the tragic circumstances that took her life. Both could change the pool and spa industry as we know it.
The victim in this case was Graeme Baker, the granddaughter of James Baker III, former secretary of state under President George Bush. While she did, indeed, technically drown, the events surrounding the accident are far more insidious. The police report lays them out in horrific detail:
The mother … tried to pull her daughter out of the pool. The mother could not lift her daughter from the pool and struggled greatly. Two persons then came to her assistance and pulled the girl out by her ankles.
Upon arrival, units … were on the scene performing CPR on [Drown Victim] … [and we were] advised that they had no pulse or heartbeat on the young girl. There were approximately 75 [persons] on the scene when this unit arrived. A graduation party was being held at the residence.
Eventually, the report leads to this revelation: It was later determined that the girl’s hip or butt was suctioned to the drain.
On June 15, 2002, Graeme Baker, a member of a powerful, politically influential family, was the victim of suction entrapment.
Historically, the pool and spa industry has never felt completely comfortable discussing safety issues. There’s a thin line between educating consumers and casting the product in a negative light. Suction entrapment, in particular, is an issue that has resulted in industry in-fighting and finger pointing over exactly how widespread the problem is and who should be held responsible. But one thing is clear: If industry members don’t take aggressive steps to solve the problem soon, forces from outside the industry may do it for them.
Although no lawsuits have yet been filed in the Baker case, a family spokesman issued a statement to Pool & Spa News, clearly indicating that the writing is on the wall.
“The swimming pool and spa industry has been well aware of these risks since the late 1970s,” says Robert T. Hall, an attorney for Nancy and James Baker IV, Graeme’s parents. “Their products are especially hazardous to children. Since the 1980s, there have been at least 147 entrapment incidents documented, resulting in 36 deaths.”
Hall goes on to say that the Bakers plan to hold the industry accountable for the suction entrapment phenomenon.
“We pledge to do all within our power to see that this industry meets its obligation to an unsuspecting public,” he says. “[Graeme’s] senseless death should be a wake-up call for this industry to accept responsibility for all such deaths and injuries and be accountable for the decades it has ignored its duties.”
Today, the general public and even many within the industry, remain unenlightened when it comes to this issue. What exactly is suction entrapment and how does it happen? More importantly, how often does it happen?
A powerful force
Children are fascinated with the current created by a swimming pool’s circulation system, often sticking their hands or feet in its path just for the thrill of feeling the powerful force of the suction. Litigators like to refer to such a thing as an “attractive nuisance.”
That “nuisance” is compounded by the aging of America’s pools, inconsistent construction standards and millions of unaware consumers.
Occasionally, drain covers break, or are removed by people who don’t know the possible repercussions. When this happens, a swimmer playing with the drain can become stuck to the outlet much the way the hose of a vacuum cleaner sticks to your palm. The force of a pool’s suction can be tremendous: 350 pounds of pressure for an 8-inch main drain with a standard pump. This “suction entrapment” will hold the bather in its grip until either the vacuum is broken, or he or she drowns, defying the rescue efforts of onlookers.
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Entrapment survivors: These swimmers escaped death, but they bear the marks of their struggles. With a typical 8-inch main drain and pool pump exerting 350 pounds of pressure, the suction can create a powerful force.
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There are actually five types of suction entrapment:
• Body entrapment (a section of the torso becomes entrapped).
• Limb entrapment (an arm or leg is pulled into an open drain pipe).
• Hair entrapment or entanglement (hair is pulled in and wrapped around the grate of the drain cover).
• Mechanical (jewelry or part of the bather’s clothing gets caught in the drain or the grate).
• Evisceration (the victim’s buttocks come into contact with the pool suction outlet and he or she is disemboweled).
In the past decade, a variety of methods have been used to address the problem. Yet, the industry lacks consistent, nationwide training requirements for pool building and maintenance. Currently, each state has its own series of complex, sometimes contradictory codes that are hard to even understand, let alone enforce.
“We can write all the codes we want, but enforcing them is a big task,” says Ron Gaffner, co-owner of Aqua Safe, a safety consulting firm in Houston. “[Safety] inspectors are being pulled in a lot of different directions and we, as an industry, have to educate them on what to look for.”
Some of the solutions offered include the elimination of single-source suction. Remember the vacuum cleaner hose mentioned earlier? Imagine there are two hoses connected to the same motor, and one is covered by your palm. Air would travel through the other hose, interrupting the suction to your hand. The same concept can be applied to pools by building dual main drains instead of a single one.
Another solution lies in a number of safety vacuum release systems, aka SVRS. These devices are designed to shut off the pump when they sense an excessive vacuum buildup.
Finally, there are anti-entanglement drain covers, a type of fitting that is molded in a particular way to prevent hair entanglement.
These systems make up what anti-entrapment advocates refer to as “layers of protection.” Many believe that if such measures become mandated standards, the suction entrapment problem will go away.
Lawmakers in California, Texas, Florida, Ohio and New Jersey have recently legislated all or part of these protections. However, there are still states, such as Texas, that don’t even require contracting licenses for pool builders, allowing anyone with a backhoe and a business card to join the industry. It’s states such as these where pool builders are more likely to either not know or care about standards — mandated or otherwise.
Safety in numbers
The saying goes that one suction entrapment death is one too many and, consequently, lawmakers should mandate safety requirements for the way pools are constructed.
But the reality is that solid data revealing the true extent of suction entrapment would go a long way toward persuading the cynics. The Consumer Product Safety Commission, the federal agency charged with gathering such data, says its numbers are not completely reliable. This is due to a lack of awareness on the part of emergency personnel, who often report entrapment casualties simply as drowning victims.
The quandary is that entrapment incidences are relatively rare and this makes it easy for the problem to slide under the radar.
Pat Taaffe, an engineer with the Cedar Hammock Fire Department in Bradenton, Fla., says a majority of rescue workers just aren’t savvy about the suction entrapment issue. “The personnel in my company didn’t know about [suction entrapment] until about two years ago,” he explains. “In the past, we would have reported it as a drowning or near-drowning.”
The problem is that rescue workers have more pressing tasks than worrying about the reports they fill out hours after the incident has taken place, according to Dan Schmidt, director of public information at the Fairfax County Fire and Rescue Department in Virginia — the department that responded in the Graeme Baker case. A rescue worker’s primary focus is saving lives.
Picture a busy emergency room in a suburban hospital. Paramedics wheel in a critical patient, lungs filled with water. An overworked doctor tries in vain to save the young victim’s life. In the wake of tragedy, the physician will likely name the cause of death as “drowning” without much attention paid to what caused the accident in the first place.
“In the Baker case, we tried to resuscitate, but she was pronounced dead at the hospital and then it was finished for us,” Schmidt says. “I don’t see anything wrong with adding another box on the form [to report entrapment incidences], but I think ultimately the pool industry needs to police itself to make sure pools and hot tubs are as safe as can be.”
Paul McCain, a firefighter in Sunrise, Fla., and co-owner of Play Safe Systems, a company that makes an anti-entrapment device, says that he’s been guilty of filing incomplete reports as well. “Every time I ran on a drowning call ... it was reported as a drowning — nothing about how it happened,” he says. “I could have run across a [suction entrapment call] and never knew it.”
Between January 1985 and March 2002, there were 147 confirmed, recorded suction entrapment incidences, according to CPSC records. Fifty-one of those were hair entanglement, 79 body or limb entrapments (including three eviscerations), four mechanical and 13 unknown. Of the 147 incidences, 36 resulted in deaths.
Even though these figures are relatively low, it’s clear the problem is underreported.
Jacquie Elder, the CPSC’s assistant executive director for hazard identification and reduction, notes that most of the data is anecdotal, so the numbers are probably low. “We have ways to get [the information], a number of sources,” she says. “[We use] hospital emergency rooms, death certificates, incident reports via news clips or reports to our hot line or Web site. But there are cases where it might be difficult to find out.”
Still, safety experts think the industry can do more.
“[Suction entrapment] doesn’t happen as much as toddler drownings, but it’s still horrible and the thing is, it’s easily preventable,” says Merle Stoner, owner of Poolguard, a North Vernon, Ind., manufacturer of pool safety products, and a member of the ASTM executive committee on consumer products. “Why do we have to wait until [the number of victims] goes above 10,000 before we do anything? The industry needs to be proactive.”
What’s to be done?
Over the past several years, the debate over just what to do about suction entrapment has polarized the industry. Some were initially taken aback when SVRS manufacturers campaigned to have states mandate their devices on public pools.
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Danger below: Broken or missing drain covers increase the likelihood of a suction entrapment tragedy.
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“There is not one solution for all five forms of entrapment, that’s for sure. So when the SVRS manufacturers portrayed themselves as the one solution, I think that’s what got the industry a little angry,” says David Nibler, director of new business development and marketing at Water Pik Technologies, a pool equipment manufacturer based in Newport Beach, Calif. “But now I think they’ve accepted the idea of layers of protection, and I see the industry accepting them more for doing that. I definitely subscribe to layers of protection — backup systems.”
Though many industries blanch at the idea of government involvement in the way they do business, the National Spa & Pool Institute (the industry’s largest trade association) has been more agreeable to the idea as long as legislation focuses on layers of protection without mandating specific products.
Yet last summer, when the International Code Council revised its residential code, it added an appendix that calls for SVRSs on both single and multisource suction pools. Industry reaction was tempered somewhat by the fact that states adopting the new law have to specifically cite the SVRS appendix to make it local law. While ICC officials know that 42 states have adopted the new code, there is no way of knowing how many also have taken on the SVRS appendix.
“I haven’t heard of anyone adopting it,” says Paul Armstrong, vice president of architectural and engineering services for ICC. “It’s hard to say for sure.”
For its part, NSPI has begun to write its own voluntary standards designed to prevent suction entrapment.
“The standards will describe the phenomena and break it down into the five categories and then define the technologies that will take care of each specific type of entrapment,” says Carvin DiGiovanni, the trade group’s senior director of technical education and government relations. “It won’t damage the existing SVRS [market]. In fact, it will embrace it.”
But besides relying on codes and standards, what should industry members do? Are pool and spa equipment manufacturers culpable for the products they produce? A Miami jury certainly thought so. In September 2003, it found pump manufacturer Sta-Rite liable for $104 million in the suction entrapment of teenager Lorenzo Peterson, who was left in a vegetative state after getting his arm entrapped in an apartment complex pool’s main drain. It is the largest judgment to date against a maker of pool or spa equipment.
“They were found liable in that they had a design defect,” explains Michael Haggard, the attorney representing the Peterson family, who claims pump manufacturers should have a built-in device that senses vacuum buildup and then automatically shuts down.
Many in the pool and spa industry thought the Peterson jury had missed the point. “The Sta-Rite judgment was absurd,” says Bill Kent, president of Horner Equipment, a manufacturer and distributor of pool products based in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. “I think ultimately [individuals] should be responsible for their own activities. And as long as [products] are safe in the normal use pattern, I think, morally and ethically, we can feel good about them. But the court has decided that something bad has happened, so someone has to pay for it.”
The problem, says Water Pik’s Nibler, is that the industry is a “custom-built project” business. “We can’t always foresee the conditions and design parameters,” he says. “You can never [predict] how the end user might abuse normal, logical safety parameters. You just can’t control 100 percent of all situations.”
Maybe not. But if pump manufacturers, along with pool builders themselves, don’t take matters into their own hands, the jury awards are likely to continue to grow and the federal government may decide it’s time to step in. It did so in 1996 with the automotive industry, making airbags a legal requirement in the wake of strong consumer demand.
“Why wait until we have one summer when [a number of] kids are getting entrapped and it hits the papers?” Stoner asks. “We don’t want to wait, and then react and get a black eye. The thing is, all this stuff can be fixed. And it’s more business for the industry [by selling safety products], while at the same time putting a good image on it.
“Making safer pools — tell me how that’s a negative thing. It’s win-win.”
