Re: O.C. mother charged with murder

O>> n Sun, 2 Mar 2008 23:17:16 -0500, Bo Raxo wrote
(in article <icCdnXVlwJk75lbanZ2dnUVZ_tajnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxx>):

Politics. Legislators are not going to vote for something that will require
property owners - your prime voters, especially ones who can afford pools -
to immediately lay out a bundle of cash. There would be a huge fuss,
especially as many of them don't have kids. News reports of senior citizens
forced to sell their home because they couldn't afford a fence, etc. The
most they could do was pass legislation requiring it for new pools. <<

Yeah, we've got a similar diving-board thing in this state (PA). You can't
put a diving board on a new residential pool, but they didn't try to make
people who already had them remove them. We are 'grandfathered in.'

I don't know anything about pools (except they're great, I swim a couple of
times a week). But would a pool cover have prevented this? Are they very
expensive? Maybe the legislature has to be pressured to require pool covers
in homes with small children. <<

Only the rigid 'safety' covers. But not the tarp-style covers (held down
with either water bags or other weights, or staked down to the lawn by ropes
attached to grommets) that most people have to cover their home pools.
Probably even a small child would be in danger of dragging a vinyl or canvas
tarp down into the water if they fell on it. Which is, in fact, more
dangerous than simply falling into the uncovered water -- if you get tangled
up in a tarp, it might impede your ability to swim (or float) back up to the
surface.

I can't imagine why anyone with a
small child wouldn't put up a proper safety fence without having to be
compelled by law, though.

I can: $$$ <<

It's not just money. It's also appearance of the yard, combined with the
fact that most people feel generally pretty confident that they can keep
their own children safe. When we moved into this house, we not only had a
fence around the whole backyard; there was a shorter fence directly around
the pool itself. We're required to have the backyard completely fenced by
law (a pool is an "attractive nuisance"), but without children, we didn't see
a need to have the second fence marring the look of our yard and getting in
the way of our access to our own pool. So we took it down. Most people who
own pools don't have that second fence directly around the pool, and a large
percentage of them have children. When people read about pools and whether
they are fenced on not, they are generally hearing about whether the _yard_
is fenced or not. The pool laws in most localities (which are often based on
the BOCA building code) require a fence of some kind, and while it's
acknowledged that the closer the fence to the pool itself, the safer it is,
most people will opt for fencing the _yard_ rather than the pool. Which is
in compliance with the law.

So, in my opinion, kids who fall into pools at their homes and drown because
of a lack of fence weren't in any more inherent danger than (most) kids who
live in homes where the pool _is_ fenced, because in most of those cases it
is their _yard_ that is fenced, and kids do have access to their own yards,
generally speaking. They key here is, as in all of these stories, that
parents need to watch their young children at all times (which is a lot
easier if you're not passed out drunk).

Amy
--
"In my line of work you gotta keep repeating things over and over and over
again for the truth to sink in, to kinda catapult the propaganda." - George
W. Bush, May 24, 2005

.

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