Child Drownings Spur Crusades for Safe Pools : Hazard: An O.C. father whose son nearly died leads one effort. Some in the pool industry are opposed.

Nearly nine months after the accident, Jim Landis is still haunted by the image of his 18-month-old son, a chubby, blond-haired boy, clad in blue coveralls, floating face down in the family pool.

Jeffrey had been playing beside his father last December when Landis left his son alone briefly to get a broom from the garage. He returned perhaps 45 seconds later to find Jeffrey unconscious in the pool.

But Landis was lucky. A passing patrolman administered cardiopulmonary resuscitation, getting the child breathing again within minutes. Hospitalized briefly, Jeffrey suffered neither brain damage nor pneumonia, and today is an active 2-year-old with no memory of his brush with death.

But Landis remembers. And determined that no other parent should go through the anguish of a near-drowning or drowning, the 39-year-old commercial real estate broker has become a crusader for pool safety.

Since April, he has been meeting with county supervisors and officials in Newport Beach, Laguna Niguel and Irvine, trying to persuade them that a tough new ordinance--requiring a safety cover or a 5-foot barrier around every pool--is needed to protect small children.

Working with Children’s Hospital of Orange County and his newly formed Children’s Pool Safety Organization, Landis is also developing a poster and video campaign to educate parents on CPR and pool safety techniques.

Landis’ effort is the latest in a wave of hotly debated, anti-drowning campaigns that have often pitted pool builders against parents, pediatricians and other safety advocates.

Similar drives led to a variety of pool safety ordinances in Northern California’s Contra Costa County in 1984, in Dallas in 1988, and this year in Arlington, Tex., and Montgomery County, Md., as well as Tucson, Phoenix and the entire state of Arizona.

Pool builders argue that requirements for fences or pool covers will price potential buyers out of the market. But safety experts note a growing awareness by builders and parents alike that the alluring back-yard pool can be a deathtrap.

In Arizona, California, Florida and Texas, drowning is the leading cause of death for children under the age of 5, according to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission.

Also, commission officials say, each year about 350 children under age 5 drown in back-yard pools and another 4,200 receive emergency room treatment for “submersion.” While some “near-drowners” recover completely, others incur severe brain damage and are hospitalized for life.

In Orange County, 11 children under age 5 typically drown each year and another 90 are hospitalized in near-drownings, county epidemiologist Hildy Meyers said. In Los Angeles County last year, more than 23 children under age 5 drowned and an estimated 240 nearly drowned. And in San Diego, five children under age 5 drowned in pools or spas and another 50 went to San Diego’s Children’s Hospital after near-drownings.

Although the drowning statistics have not varied greatly for years, safety experts still call them shocking.

“If a tiger got loose and ate eight kids--it’s the same thing,” said J. Randall Ogden, a Tucson paramedic who led the fight for his city’s new fencing ordinance. “It (a pool) is like a tiger in your back yard.”

Lee Baxter, western regional director for the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, called drownings for children under 5 comparable to deaths from polio for that age group in the 1950s.

“You know we aren’t going to have a Salk vaccine for swimming pool deaths,” Baxter said. “But we can do other steps that are pragmatic. Fences have a role. So do swimming pool covers and alarms” that signal when a door to the pool has opened.

Around the nation, cities have long required fences around a pool--typically a three-sided fence along the property line, with the house on the fourth side. The idea was to “keep a trespassing child out of the pool,” Baxter said. “No real thought was given to the child that lives there.”

But a 1986 Consumer Product Safety Commission study showed the child most at risk for drowning was the child with a pool at his home. In its study of “submersion” incidents, 98% of the children lived with the pool; only 2% were trespassers.

The commission has proposed a model code that would make it hard for children to approach their back-yard pools unobserved. In addition to a 4-foot-high fence on at least three sides of the pool--the other side being the house--the code requires alarms on doors to the house if they open to the water.

The commission is near agreement with a national pool group as well as the nation’s building code officials on the ordinance. If approved--probably in September--Baxter said his agency will ask cities to apply the code not only to new pools but to the nation’s 6 million existing pools.

William Sadd, director of the National Spa and Pool Institute, representing pool industry officials, said the proposed requirements were not prohibitively expensive. An automatic cover may add $5,000 to the cost of a typical $20,000, 15-by-30-foot California pool, he said; a fence probably less than that.

“Everybody agrees that adult supervision is the key factor in preventing child drownings,” Sadd said. “And in every case of child drowning, there’s been a failure of adult supervision. So . . . you have to establish other lines of defense.”

But Sadd’s views were denounced by several western pool builders. Charlie Rumpf, owner of Anaheim’s Monarch Pools, said many Orange County lots were too narrow for both a pool and surrounding fence.

Besides, Rumpf argued: “Why should you have a fence if you don’t have kids? And if you have kids--look at the statistics: 38% of the drownings happen inside the fence . . . Our feeling is there’s nothing that can replace the parents watching the kids. We feel that’s a better approach than going out here with a shotgun and passing a lot of bills that will hurt our industry.”

Also, fences don’t work, said California pool lobbyist Donald C. Burns, because “invariably they’re wired open in the summer swimming season.”

Burns, executive vice president of the California Spa and Pool Council, representing 600 pool retailers and manufacturers, also argued that new fencing creates “a false sense of security” and does not substitute for supervision.

Still, recent studies make a case for fencing. A July 6 federal report on child drownings in Maricopa County, Ariz., suggested that “pool fencing in combination with adequate gates and latches could have prevented 70 (51%) of the 137 drownings or near drownings.”

In addition, a 1988 Australian study predicted that 73% of all back-yard drownings in the Perth metropolitan area “could have been avoided had isolation fencing (fencing around a pool) been in place.”

Meanwhile, leaders in several communities with fencing ordinances said they believed new regulations had helped to reduce drownings.

In Contra Costa County, where the nation’s first ordinance requires a fence, a pool cover, or alarms on doors to the pool, drownings dropped from 12 in 1983 to three in 1984, the year it took effect, said Larry Cohen, the county health department’s director of prevention programs. Local officials are also pleased that the law’s $25 fee for new pools raised $12,000 for safety education last year.

And time and again, they credited one woman’s campaign for their law.

In July, 1978, housewife Nadina Rigsby left her 2-year-old daughter Samira and 14-month-old son Jerry with a baby-sitter. She returned home to find her daughter dead and her son in a coma after both children fell into the pool. The sitter had left them alone, supposedly watching television, for 15 minutes, Rigsby said. But Samira apparently unlatched the door to the pool, and the baby followed his sister outside to the water.

In months of tending “J.J.” at Oakland Children’s Hospital, Rigsby said, she “started seeing babies coming in every week”--victims of near-drownings. And in 1980, after her severely brain-damaged son finally came home, she began her drive for a pool ordinance.

Four years after passage of the ordinance, Rigsby is still energetically campaigning against drowning. As founder of an educational group, the Drowning Prevention Foundation, Rigsby said: “My goal is to protect children from themselves. They can’t read the English that says don’t go near the pool.”

For all that, Rigsby would like to amend her law, killing the provision about pool alarms. “People are putting in little Mickey Mouse alarms to satisfy the building department and then disconnecting them,” she complained. And musing aloud, Rigsby suggested that perhaps there were really no safe pools. “The only answer,” she said, “is no water.”

In Tucson, where a pool ordinance took effect in January, anti-drowning activists suggest that publicity from the campaign may have reduced drownings this year.

Tucson had 12 drownings and 39 near-drownings last year but “this year we’ve had one death so far and only 16 near-drownings. So we’re way down,” said Ogden, the paramedic who is program coordinator of the Tucson Drowning Prevention Committee.

As part of its campaign, the committee has circulated a pool safety curriculum for preschoolers and sponsored radio spots and posters featuring a grieving paramedic beside a pool. The message: “What do you say to a parent who leaves a child alone by a pool? I’m sorry. . . . We did all we could.”

But unhappy with the new law--and with what he calls “scare tactics” by Ogden--is Mark A. Ragel, general manager of Southern Arizona’s largest pool company, Patio Pools.

Ragel called a mandatory fencing law unfair and said he was now fighting city bureaucrats after an elderly customer with a $10,000 pool installed a $600 fence--but still failed to meet the code.

“What we’re discriminating against (with the new ordinance) is the elderly and retired people that don’t have kids in the home,” Ragel railed.

But Ogden, who has been present at every drowning or near-drowning scene in the city since 1982, has little sympathy for pool owners who complain about the cost of a fence.

If someone budgets $10,000 for a pool and can’t afford the $1,500 fence, “that’s OK,” Ogden said. “My feeling is that $1,500 is the cost of an emergency room visit” after a near-drowning, he said, adding that it costs tens of thousands a year to take care of a child with neurological dysfunction.

In Orange County, Landis has been studying posters from Tucson and getting advice from Rigsby as part of his campaign.

So far, local officials are interested. “From the data we have, it looks like (a fencing ordinance) would aid in preventing childhood drowning,” said county epidemiologist Meyers. But if an ordinance applied only to new pools--and not the county’s 100,000 existing pools--it would be many years before its impact was visible, she said.

Newport Beach building director Ray W. Schuller said he would wait to see if the International Conference of Building Officials adopted a model pool code at its September meeting in Denver.

“It’s a great idea. It saves lives, so obviously it’s something we should think about,” Schuller said. “The other side of the coin is, people ordinarily think of their home as their castle, and they don’t want us to mess with it.”

Meanwhile, Landis has been following nearly weekly reports of children drowned or nearly drowned in back-yard pools. In the last few weeks, a 22-month-old Newport Beach boy died when he fell into his parents’ spa. And a 6-year-old boy died three days after he was pulled unconscious from the bottom of a Costa Mesa swimming pool.

Each story is “upsetting,” Landis said. “You just feel so sorry for the people. . . . It just makes me want to hurry up and get something done.”