April 22, 2000
Upon completing the Safety research that I have been involved in for almost two years now, I have had some time to reflect on the information that was accumulated. The following are some of the thoughts that are recurring and hopefully have been or will be answered in the near future.
I began this quest two years ago because 3 meter diving boards were disappearing from swimming pools across the country and wanted to find out why. I asked my school district about the insurance issue because they had pools and were insured. I wanted to know if a swimming pool conformed to all of the National Governing Board's recommended depths and distances (State codes, NCAA, US Diving, NHSFA and YMCA), was there a difference in price from those that did not? This question was asked because at one point, high boards were being taken out so insurance rates could be lowered. The answer I got caused confusion because it was related to a general blanket policy. Example: you have a pool; this is the price. You have a gym; this is the price and so on. Insurance coverage did not seem to be tied to depths or whether there was a high or low board. Just the fact that you had a pool dictated the cost of coverage. If this was what the insurance industry was doing, then why were diving boards disappearing?
Another reason might be that there were a number of recreational diving accidents. Being involved with United States Diving since its inception and the AAU prior to that, I knew it wasn't because of competitive diving injuries. That's when I decided to look at it from the recreational perspective.
The Consumer Products Safety Commission (National Electronic Injury Surveillance System), National Spa and Pool Institute and numerous Paralysis Associations had figures on diving accidents. As I looked at them, some of the statistics dated back to the last time I collected information (which started in 1977). Some discrepancies were found in the information. Spinal Cord Injuries appeared synonymous with Spinal Column Injuries as the various authors interchanged these terms. Cervical injuries seemed to be occurring most frequently at the transitional slope to the shallow end in residential and apartment complex pools. Up to 80% of spinal injuries were connected to alcohol use. All of the statistics found were estimates. Concrete reliable statistics could not be found; therefore I decided not to use any for fear of misinterpretation or misrepresentation.
What became obvious was that statistics were being thrown around giving a false conception that diving from diving boards was not safe. Because local facilities keep records of injuries in their pools, data should be able to be found rather easily. The same should hold true with local boards of health on up. I eventually found that there were no catastrophic diving accidents in public pools, from the use of diving boards in the State of Illinois. According to the estimates however, Illinois was included in the averages according to the above organizations. If that was the case, then how many other states were included in these estimates that were accident free in this category? This led to the conclusion that many reported diving accidents were occurring in residential and apartment complex swimming pools. These residential and apartment pool diving board accidents were creating problems for both Competitive and Recreational diving.
Again the question of "Why were diving boards disappearing?" needed to be answered. Since Risk Management evolved, maybe they could be suggesting that facilities remove their diving boards. Risk Management seems to be in existence to figure out how to manage the risks that various pool owners may face. They do not recommend the type of pool to be built or the various pieces of equipment that might be placed in a swimming pool. When pool owners join a Risk Management Association, risk managers look at the facilities and records and suggest ways to avoid and/or minimize their liability.
If this is the case, then there are only two factions left when it comes to disappearing diving boards. One is the pool owner/operators because they are the ones that have these facilities built and eventually maintain them. The other is the program administrator. They are the people who design the programs used in their pools. It would be hard to separate these two factions because in smaller locations they could be one and the same person. As mentioned in an earlier article, pool owner/operators build facilities that they can afford to operate. Since there has been a recent shift in philosophy, they prefer to make a profit from their pools as opposed to breaking even as has been done in the past. The program administrators create activities and convince the owner/operators to make changes in pool designs to accommodate any new activities. The water park phenomena now emerged and also the disappearance of diving boards.
Even if we could pin point the responsibility for the disappearance of diving boards in swimming pools, there is still the underlying misconception that diving is unsafe. This misconception has been around since the 1970's and has yet to be been clarified.
All parties, owner /operators, Insurance industry, program administrators and risk managers must be better informed of these misconceptions. Beyond that, there should be a more accurate reporting system and/or means to report these accidents. Lumping all diving accidents into the same category makes it almost impossible to find the truth. What we know at this time is that shallow water anywhere and residential and apartment complex swimming pools are not safe places in which to dive. Reporting these accidents as "Sports Injuries" is not accurate to say the least. This type of inaccuracy in reporting will never help provide the appropriate remedial action that may be needed to prevent these types of injuries in the future.