Hidden Danger: Maintenance Equipment You’ve purchased the appropriate rescue safety equipment, such as a ring buoy to throw to a drowning victim, shepherd’s hook, and first aid kit. You place them around the pool area, figuring they’ll be easy to grab in an emergency. Then one afternoon, a boy falls into the water. His father searches frantically for a buoy but can’t find it because it’s buried in a heap of maintenance equipment.
Safer Solution: Keep gear separate. All safety equipment should be properly labeled and kept together in a separate area, away from maintenance poles and other non-emergency gear. “Nine out of ten times, I go into an apartment complex and the rescue pole is either above or below the maintenance pole, the skimmer, and the vacuum cleaner, which is absolutely ridiculous,” says Dworkin of Lifesaving Resources. A resident doesn’t know the difference between safety equipment and a maintenance device when they are all on the same wall, he says. If you have a diverse resident population, be sure to post all labels and signs in several languages.
Hidden Danger: Unusable Safety Gear If you’ve properly labeled all the rescue and safety equipment and grouped the items together, you may think you’re ready to handle any emergency. But suppose two unsupervised children are running around the pool, and one falls into the deep end. The other child runs to the safety equipment and picks up the shepherd’s hook but has no clue how to use it. His friend is left helpless.
Safer Solution: Educate your residents. Providing safety gear is only half the battle; equipment is meaningless if residents don’t know how to use it. In 2003, the Arizona Multihousing Association (AMA) introduced Project S.A.F.E.–Safety and Awareness Family Education–to teach apartment residents about safety issues. The annual month-long program covers five topics, from disaster preparation and missing children to pool safety. The program is run by the AMA, the American Red Cross, and the Nation’s Missing Children Organization and Center for Missing Adults.
“As you can imagine, out here there are just so many pools, and the number of drownings is very high in Arizona,” says Wayne Kaplan, AMA’s director of community relations, so the association decided to address these concerns. And from a liability point of view, offering pool safety courses is a good way to strengthen your defense that you have tried to deal with the issue before there was a problem, he adds.
This past April, American Red Cross instructors visited 48 properties throughout the Phoenix metro area, showing residents how to use safety devices and teaching children basic pool safety rules. More than 250 residents showed up at a water safety class at the Preserve Townhomes, a 360-unit community in Phoenix managed by Trillium. “So many families live at the Preserve, so we definitely wanted to do something special for that community,” LaRocca says. The key is to make the events fun to encourage attendance, she adds. The event was coupled with a big barbeque party.
Hidden Danger: Uninformed Employees Residents aren’t the only ones who can benefit from safety training. What happens if someone falls in the pool and the only one nearby is an employee?
Safer Solution: Require lifesaving training. To ensure that employees know how to respond to such situations, Calex Realty Group Inc., a Jacksonville, Fla.-based firm, requires that all maintenance supervisors and community managers take a pool safety and rescue course. The class consists of two hours of lecture and two hours of hands-on practice, with certified instructors demonstrating lifesaving techniques.
The training pays off. About two years ago, a 3-year-old boy was drowning, and his mother couldn’t help him because she didn’t know how to swim, says Michael Martin, executive director of human resource development at Calex. “One of our employees rescued him, giving him the gift of life,” he says.
That’s the best possible ending in what could have been a devastating situation. Unfortunately, it often takes calamities like the near-drowning of a child to spur public awareness of safety issues. After the Loren Hinton verdict, an owner of a condo complex in Deston, Fla., called Haggard, the Hintons’ attorney, to see how he could safeguard his community.
“I told him, and he went and did it all,” Haggard says. “He probably spent a couple of hundred dollars, and his insurance premiums probably dropped thousands of dollars.” Most important, he’s much less likely to have an accident.