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.
Do folks not anchor these‽ this is so freakin’ sad.
They would have to drive the anchors deep into the ground to have any effect. The types of anchors I’ve seen on these things are little more than tent stakes to keep it stationary.
I think these need to be strapped to concrete barrels to be safe. Or banned if there is any wind over some limit.
We used to have our trampoline secured with the corkscrew type anchors. I wonder if those are strong enough. I know our trampoline never budged with those.
They need to be banned. This happens almost every year.
One child almost every year is a staggeringly low incidence rate. If that’s enough to get banned then children should also not be allowed near pet dogs, the beach, family members, heavy furniture, inside cars, or outside.
Funny, because we recall products that can kill children all the time, even when there are low death counts, because any lethal scenario that is possible with a child’s toy or child-focused product must be accounted for.
At a minimum, the law must require that these be anchored securely enough not to be blow away. Put it on the companies that rent these out and set them up to do so safely, instead of making any amount of dead children an acceptable cost.
If this happens with any regularity at all, regardless of how rare, there’s no excuse for letting it happen again.
I’m fine with requiring them to be anchored, and you’re right that safety laws are pretty strict for toys, but we can’t mandate literally-zero-risk-of-harm. “Rare” and “regular” are terms I generally think of as opposed and there’s always going to be some cold calculation of “acceptable risk” on a personal and a societal scale.
Playgrounds. Hot dogs. Stairs. Cars (inside, outside, around). Cement. Bicycles.
Ban outside!
Yes, we must not sacrifice precious bounce houses just because one kid every so often dies /s
Just like when Kansas had that boy get decapitated by a water slide net due to their lack of regulations - why change safety regulations because 1 kid died?
And compare how ubiquitous bounce houses are versus dogs or others things. Because there aren’t a ton of these, it’s easier to regulate.
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.
This is a great perspective.
I do actually think the design of bounce houses themselves is indeed what makes them dangerous. They are lightweight and filled with air by design, to be portable. They then can catch wind underneath them, again due to their design and how they are used with kids jumping on them, which makes them airborne. It is THIS specific situation that I take issue with and think they should be banned. Normal injuries from kids jumping into each other are acceptable imo, not a big deal. Even kids falling from a set height with most traditional playground equipment is acceptable risk as long as the structure itself is firmly in the ground as it is designed to be.
However, the design itself of bounce houses is the problem. They very thing that makes them bounce houses, is what makes them unacceptably dangerous imo.
I’m gonna defer to this guy John Knox, who has been studying bounce houses for two decades. https://accesswdun.com/article/2022/8/1123579/uga-study-discovers-132-dangerous-bounce-house-related-incidents
Airborn events are dramatic and awful but rare and preventable, and I think gut reaction legislation is bad practice. I would like to see widespread adoption of laws for securing and operating these things but I don’t think they meet “ban outright” danger. Backyard pools are way deadlier and I don’t even think those should go away.
We should ban drugs because they kill loads of peepo
Yes let’s give kids drugs, according to you
Just like pool drownings right?
Good luck with the liability lawsuit when a child drowns in your pool and you don’t have a locked fence between the public road and the pool. They will take everything you own in that lawsuit, because you didn’t take necessary safety measures to protect children.
The same should apply to a bounce house, not anchored properly, launching a child to a violent death.
Set up the law so that the responsible parties that failed can be sued into bankruptcy, or perhaps even jailed for public endangerment or manslaughter due to their negligence.
None of this “nothing we could do” BS. Bounce Houses shouldn’t blow away except in the most extreme conditions, and it should be obvious under those conditions not to use a bounce house.
They are supposed to be secured, in fairly sure
Yeah I’m picturing ground stakes like a tent, right? I’ll settle for a rope to a nearby tree stump.
Yes. They have loops on the edges to be able to stake them in.
They’re supposed to be, yes.
I’m morbidly curious about how they were hurt from the fall. The article implies they fell out of the house, which I guess makes sense, because if they were still inside, it would have provided a soft landing.
The article doesn’t imply anything, it directly tells you that the bounce house was blown 15-20 feet in the air by a gust of wind, and children fell out at approximately that height before it landed on the playing field. Maybe finish reading the article, or at least click the link they provided to the press release if it wasn’t clear enough for you: https://www.charlescountymd.gov/Home/Components/News/News/5361/400
On August 2 at 9:21 p.m., Charles County 9-1-1 Public Safety Communications received a call from the Regency Furniture Stadium reporting that a moon bounce house became airborne due to a wind gust, while children were inside it. At the time, the Southern Maryland Blue Crabs 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.
Sorry if this is a little terse, but every single thread on this site has someone saying “I read the article and I still don’t know what happened”, only for me to read the same article and conclude that the person commenting only read the headline. Which is exactly what I would expect from some dumb person reading the headline “1 child killed after wind gust sends bounce house airborne at baseball game” and not understanding if the child fell out or not because it wasn’t in the headline.
Well at least you took the time to summarize the pertinent part and complain about having to do it! Time is valuable, and I appreciate your sacrifice.
I recently saw one which had foot-long stakes driven at an angle. I wonder if that would be secure enough. I didn’t consider wind as a major threat at the time.
It also had a big pocket on the front that said in big letters that it just always contain the manual — empty, obviously.
They often have mesh (not bouncy) sides, and even landing from 20’ on your neck on the inflated surface seems like it could be deadly. How awful.
That had to be the magic-bullet of wind gusts. Tragic.
This happened in Australia when one just blew away with a heap of kids in it. Does no one learn any more?
IKR. at this point I am angry this is still happening. There have been several in recent years. There is just no excuse for not knowing at this point. Andvthat includes the parents… extreme winds and storms were in the forecast.
I think these should just be banned unless operated by professionals. Something about them invites unsafe practices, people think it’s a kids’ toy so it’ll be safe and foolproof.
Yeah, but I hate penalizing all the people who are responsible for the actions of those who aren’t. And who would even determine what a professional is…
I mean, the penalty is less bounce houses. It’s not that horrible lol
But it ends up as a race to the bottom. Everything is dangerous in some way to some irresponsible people. We can’t ban everything cause someone could manage to accidentally kill someone with it. We would have nothing left.
There are 2 issues.
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bounce houses aren’t really a necessary thing for the risk. We aren’t banning “everything” just bounce houses which are used only a lil. That’s actually what bans are perfect for - small, niche items that aren’t popular. Bans become ineffective if what you’re banning is already popular, eg alcohol. Alcohol is also something you can make at home. You can’t make a bounce house at home. A ban is an appropriate suggestion here.
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hierarchy of controls. The very things that make bounce houses appealing are what make them dangerous and we rely on people to make them safe, notoriously unsafe thing in the hierarchy of controls.
Bounce houses are super popular. If you have kids, it seems like they are everywhere. And people could make them at home if they wanted. Nothing requires complex manufacturing. But they are easier to buy. And people do. I had a small one that I only used indoors for my son that I got on Amazon. If they were banned, I wouldn’t have been able to do that. And why, because others misused them. So I would be punished for other people irresponsibility.
That would set a legal precedent. And some judge would decide where to draw the line. It would end up being that politics would define what gets banned and what doesn’t. Like stimulants. Some people rely on them to function. But others want them banned because people abuse them, and can die from overdoses and such. Right now we are in the middle ground, they aren’t banned, but the barriers for people who need them mean many go without, and suffer because of it. Once we set the legal precedent with bounce houses, stimulants would be easy to ban.
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So fucking sad
