Swimming Pool Injury

I’m David Holub, an attorney focusing on personal injury law in northwest Indiana.

Welcome to Personal Injury Primer, where we break down the law into simple terms, provide legal tips, and discuss personal injury law topics.

Today’s question comes from a caller who reported an incident where she and her young child were at a hotel and using the hotel pool. Her child was swimming near the bottom of the shallow end of the pool and got trapped against an uncovered port in the circulation flow system of the pool. There was a suction flow drawing water and anything near it into a 6-inch diameter uncovered inlet. The child was drawn down to the inlet. Only through quick thinking by an older child also in the pool was the young child separated from the inlet and pulled free and brought to the surface. The child was extremely lucky as she was nearly out of breath when she was brought to the surface. The mother wanted to know her legal options.

Pool injury incidents like this due to the negligence of those operating and maintaining a pool are still common. Sometimes very small children have been pulled into an uncovered pipe and were unable to be rescued.

This type of injury is almost always the result of negligence. The hotel pool in the caller’s case was inspected by safety inspectors several months before the described incident and the hotel operator was cited for several safety violations. The pool should not have been open for swimming with an unsecured outlet. The diameter of the outlet was 6 inches in the caller’s case. In other cases publicly reported an outlet as big as 12 inches was left uncovered and was reported to have resulted in the death of a child.

In most cases, if the premises containing the pool are properly maintained and meet annual building inspections a situation like this will not happen. In almost every case a situation like that described by the caller would not happen but for the negligence of the property owner. Still, sometimes such dangerous conditions are due to a mistake made by a contractor hired to clean the pool in leaving a drain outlet uncovered.

Pool maintenance contractors have also been known to make other mistakes leading to injury. The situation described by the caller brought to mind another case where we obtained a recovery for our client.

In that case, a maintenance company had used the wrong chemical to clean a pool, and that chemical reacted with other chemicals in the pool to give off an odorless gas that was damaging to the lungs of those near the pool.

While cases such as these are governed by ordinary negligence principles and nearly always the fault of the premises owner, as a safety reminder, every parent should carefully check a pool before allowing a child to swim in the pool. Even if a child is a good swimmer, dangers as described by the caller could lead to serious injury.

I hope you found this information helpful. If you are a victim of someone’s carelessness, substandard medical care, product defect, work injury, or another personal injury, please call (219) 736-9700 with your questions. You can also learn more about us by visiting our website at DavidHolubLaw.com – while there, make sure you request a copy of our book “Fighting for Truth.”