Pool Safey and Child Drowning Prevention
Press Release # 04-142
Audio Transcript of Chairman Hal Stratton's Soundbites
Hal Stratton: "First of all, there's no fool-proof way to prevent drownings, but there are several things you can do to try to put yourself in a better position with your kids. The first thing you want to do is make sure that you supervise your children all the time when they're swimming in the backyard pool. The next thing is to have barriers around the pool, particularly a fence, you can have pool alarms, anything like that. Any kind of barriers that can prevent the young children from getting into the pool. And then finally I think every parent should have a CPR course. You should know CPR and then that way if somebody gets in trouble, you have a chance of saving them."
"The first thing we're trying to do is educate parents about how to try to keep their kids safe in pools. We'll be having a couple of field hearings this summer out in Tampa, Florida and in Phoenix, Arizona to try to get information from local folks who are involved in pool drowning prevention and get their ideas."
"We do a lot of testing on various types of consumer products like pool alarms, so we're working with the industry, and working with various product manufacturers, trying to help them come to a point where we have better pool alarms that might help us when children get caught in pools as well."
"Typically, pool safety rules, such as how you build your pool, the barriers, or things that you use, are typically local government type regulations, including state and local governments. Everyone should check with their local government entities to determine what the guidelines are in their area."
"We do have some suggested guidelines at the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission for these local governments to use and for people to use in their pools. People can find those, if they'd like, at our website at www.cpsc.gov."
End.