One child was killed and another was injured after a wind gust blew a bounce house into the air at a baseball game in Maryland on Friday night, local officials said.
Local emergency personnel received a call in Waldorf, Maryland, at about 9:21 p.m. Friday from the Regency Furniture Stadium reporting that a moon bounce house became airborne because of a wind gust while children were inside.
At the time, the Southern Maryland Blue Crabs minor league baseball team was playing a game, and “the moon bounce was carried approximately 15 to 20 feet up in the air, causing children to fall before it landed on the playing field,” according to a news release from the Charles County government posted on its website.
A 5-year-old boy from La Plata, Maryland, was flown to Children’s National Hospital in Washington, where he was later pronounced dead, the release said. A second child also was flown out by Maryland State Police with non-life-threatening injuries.
Easier to supervise, too.
If the design is inherently unsafe and regular use can result in injury, like the Verrückt water slide, then yes regulation and inspection is necessary. If the product is intended for children too young to understand basic safety precautions then strict design rules are important because we can’t trust companies to be ethical on their own. But if the object in question poses an obvious minor-to-moderate risk, things like trampolines or skateboards or tire swings, it can be reasonably expected that the object not break from normal use but supervision and safety precautions are the responsibility of the consumer.
There’s lots of room for argument about where the lines of acceptable risk are drawn. Personally I’m in favor of helmet and floatation-vest laws for children (and people accompanying children). I think bicycles are an acceptably risky thing for children to ride, but obviously tragic accidents do occur.
It’s hard to find data pertaining to bounce houses specifically as there is no official governing body tracking them. It gets lumped into sports or recreation and without usage stats it’s impossible to determine injury rate. They might not even be as dangerous as traditional playground structures.