One Relieved Mother Urges Caution : 3 Children Have Close Calls in Pools

Monica Clark was watering plants in her Westminster house around noon Monday when she looked out the window and saw her 16-month-old daughter, Michelle, sitting on the ladder of their family’s 24-foot Doughboy swimming pool.

Thinking the youngster was about to jump in, she ran outside. It was then that she saw her 2-year-old son, Kent, lying on the bottom of the pool.

Clark jumped into the 4-foot-deep pool and fished him out. “I lay my son down to see if his heart was beating. He wasn’t breathing and he was blue,” she said with a catch in her voice.

Luckily, a neighbor, Tommy Prieto, heard her call for help and administered cardiopulmonary resuscitation to the boy. After being admitted to the intensive care unit at Childrens Hospital in Orange for observation, Kent was released the same afternoon.

“I feel like calling all my friends who have a pool and warning them, because it really was a traumatic experience,” the boy’s mother said.

Kent was one of three young children treated at Childrens Hospital Monday after mishaps involving swimming pools.

Jolene and Craig Herrington of Salt Lake City were visiting relatives in Huntington Beach when their daughter, Heather, 2, crawled out a window and ventured onto the solar covering of a motel swimming pool next door, according to a Childrens Hospital spokeswoman.

Like Kent Clark, Heather was lucky. Her father administered CPR and she began breathing again almost immediately, according to Patty Lorton, a nurse at the Childrens Hospital Intensive Care Unit, the only licensed pediatric intensive care unit in the county. Heather was released from the hospital Monday evening with no ill effects, Lorton reported.

A third child, Richard Baker, 14 months, was admitted to Childrens Hospital after falling into a backyard spa in Orange. Hospital officials would not release any further information about the child’s condition or the circumstances under which the accident occurred.

Dr. Ron Perkins, acting director of the special unit, said it was unusual for the hospital to treat so many victims of near-drownings in one day. “We really expected it over the Fourth of July; I don’t know if everyone let their guard down, or what,” he said.

Recent studies show Orange County leads the nation’s counties in children’s drownings and near-drownings, which have superseded auto accidents as the county’s leading cause of death among children between the ages of 1 and 4. In 1984, 11 children drowned in Orange County, all but one of them under the age of 5.