WTF Stories of the Week

[Ghoulish Delight]

Originally Posted by JWBear

It’s nanny government any time laws or regulations are enacted that take away personal responsibility – in this case, the responsibility of the parents to keep their children from harm.

There will always be a debate about where the line is draw, but to give an extreme example, if the pool had a set of spikes at the bottom of the deep end, would it be the parents' responsibility to just supervise their kid?

Perhaps drain suction may or may not be an uber-deadly hazard, but it is a hazard and one with a solution, so it's not unheard of to insist on public facilities to have a certain level of safety precautions in place.

[Betty]

At the least there should be a warning about staying away from the drain - don't you think?

[Morrigoon]

I think a reasonable start would have been requiring it of all NEW pools, or requiring changes when reasonably possible, such as the next time the pool is drained, etc.

Also, I think someone could've come up with a domed fixture that could be installed over existing drains, rather than requiring a complete change to the drain system, which would make changes cheaper and more reasonable.

And again, there are many much more deadly and avoidable things they could've focused on.

[Alex]

Playing with the drain was the best part of going to the public school when I was a kid. That moment of fear when you poked a toe in and it took some work to pull it out was the reason for going.

Why must they destroy my childhood!

Plus, if you went down there and peed you could convince yourself it left the pool almost immediately and therefore wasn't so wrong.

I have no real opinion on whether the government should be doing it, but I wonder if it would be doing it if one of the 33 people in 20 years wasn't related to a former secretary of state.

[Alex]

I know it is cold and heartless, but on a cost benefit basis, is spending $1.2 billion* justified to save 1 life per year? It would be way more effective to allow that one kid to die and require pool owners to send $5,000 to Africa for water purification tablets (I know, that's not particularly fair, pretty much any home grown safety measure is not cost effective compared to purification tablets for African water).



*Article says 240,000 are not yet compliant and that change costs $1,000 to $15,000. So using a picked as a guess number of $5,000 per retrofit that is $1.2 billion still needing to be spent.

ETA: When the EPA does impact assessments for proposed regulations they value a human life at $6.9 million. If we assume that the new drains will last 20 years, work 100% perfectly and therefore save 33 lives, that is a value of $36.4 million.

[Morrigoon]

Oftentimes laws to "protect the children" are pushed through by people/companies who stand to make money on the regulation (remember the uterine cancer vaccine?). Now, obviously this one has something to do with a lawmaker's personal grief, but I do question such expensive regulation, because it does seem obvious to me that someone stands to make a lot of money on this.

Again, I wouldn't mind so much if the reaction were less extreme (eg: applying it only to new or remodeled pools, coming up with a less expensive alternative such as fitting a dome over an existing flat grate, etc.) Safety and reasonability must be kept in balance. Else we'd have extremes like banning cars because they kill so many people.

[Strangler Lewis]

I don't think aggregating it is a sensible way of addressing what the responsible approach of each property owner is.

Our idiot prior owners planted sequoia trees on our .11 acre lot. Very pretty. Totally inappropriate for the lots. One of them had a split trunk, to make matters worse. The trees are an inevitable hazard to driveways, fences and, eventually, rooves and brains. We just spent about a thousand having them out (to the indignation of our neighbors who called us tree-hating cretins but said that, no, they would not sign a perpetual release of liability)

We felt that spending this money now was the responsible thing to do even though it might take ten years for the one tree to crush our neighbor's house and, even then, they might not be inside at the time. If you frame the question as whether a property owner should spend one thousand, five thousand, etc. to alleviate a clear risk of harm that would result in far larger liability, then the decision becomes clearer. Aggregating the effect of that decision among everyone in the country who has a similarly costly risk on their property shouldn't distort what the right thing to do in particular cases is.

[bewitched]

There may "only" be 33 kids that have been killed by the drains but many more have been permanently injured (usually after evisceration). Further, it is thought that many more deaths are probably attributable to pool drains but are listed as drownings since that is the actual cause of death.

Examples:

Here.

Here.

http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00016693.htmAnd here.


I'm amused by the idea that somehow these kids aren't "supervised". Only someone without kids would make a blanket statement like that. The pool we go to is very well supervised. I also supervise my 8yo. Nonetheless, she is often underwater...playing games, swimming, exploring, etc.. She is an excellent swimmer. I don't get up and follow her every time her head dips underwater. I don't expect there to be a freak hidden danger like a drain that would hold her down so firmly it would suck her intestines out.

Maybe in some of your minds this makes me a bad parent. Maybe you think I don't adequately supervise my daughter. But I also think that if there wasn't a "hidden" danger, and you saw me hovering* to that extent, you would think I was a total nutjob.


*Personally, I think this kind of extreme supervision at 8 would go beyond hovering and border on some kind of pervasive psychological condition.

[Alex]

Except that aggregating is very common for evaluating whether government imposed regulations are sensible (just because something is the "right thing to do" does not necessarily mean it should be mandated by the government).

Also, I'd argue that if the only reason you removed the tree now was because of a 1 in (let's say to just pick a number) 100,000,000 chance of killing someone in any given year beyond 15 years from now that your $5,000 was very poorly spent.

If the odds of damage or death from the tree, however, are significant then aggregating might very wear bolster the case.

Conversely, what if a rather than the $5,000 fix there is a $40 fix that would save 70% of the lives (I have no idea if there is). At what point is the cost disproportionate to the minuscule -- though very real -- risk?

[JWBear]

I'm sorry, but if I were a parent, there is no way I'd allow my 7 or 8yo child swim in the deep end of the pool.