Father’s Day at the Georgetown pool:
“So let me get this straight,” I said. “If she was wearing a swimsuit with no floaties in it, that would be okay. But this suit, which is safer, is not okay.” …
“That’s right,” the manager said. “This is a government pool and that’s the D.C. government.”
(Tony Rosenberger, BLT, Jun. 18; h/t Ted on our Facebook group).
5 Comments
Hmm. Love the site, but I’m afraid I’ll have to disagree on this one (I’m a former pool manager). Kids in floaties always scared me, because they ended up farther out than they could swim, and too many parents said “oh, junior has a floatie so I can just lay here and read my book without bothering to watch him.” Floaties come off. Kids get out of suits. Strange stuff happens at a pool.
For me it wasn’t about the lawsuits, it was about imagining a little kid in a pool with 200 other people and the lifeguard missing it when he went under.
“I can speed because I have an airbag.”
Therefore, airbags should be banned.
Same logic, George.
George, I know where you’re coming from. In my youth, I was a lifeguard and I taught swim lessons at a local pool. “Water wings” or other “floaties” are indeed dangerous to children because they have been known to come off of the children without warning.
In this case, however, it sounds like the “floaties” are sewn into the swim suit, so there’s little danger of that. In addition, the scenario you described would be equally true of “Coast Guard approved” flotation devices, which seemed to be the only criteria that mattered to the lifeguards in the article.
I think there may be another issue here. A poorly designed flotation device can keep the wearer on the surface but in a dangerous position, face down in the water. The regulation may be aimed at these. Of course, this isn’t relevant if her father is just going to hold her in the water and she isn’t going to swim or go into deep water.
Knowing that floaties were against the rules I brought a certified life jacket, I was told that it too was against the rules.
The story about this dad floaties reaffirms what I already knew. One would think that the real solution is to ban parents that don’t watch their kids, floaties or not.