Pool Safety – Hazards in the Pool Enclosure

Swimming Pool owners are starting to shift their focus from “all about the fun” to issues of pool safety, so take a look around your swimming pool enclosure and consider what is in the enclosure that could adversely affect the safety of your family and visitors to your home.

Distractions and Hazards in the Pool Enclosure:

Do you have trip hazards, such as trikes & toys, loose rocks or bricks or even redundant building materials left lying around or do you house your clothes line inside the pool enclosure?

For safety’s sake, keep the toys elsewhere, remove any loose materials and move your clothes line outside the enclosure, as neither are considered pool safe, but for different reasons.

Children tend to run around the pool when playing and it is wise to remove anything they could trip over or hurt themselves on.  As for the clothes line, it is not allowable to have this type of item in the enclosure, as it detracts from active supervision.  If you are regularly coming into the enclosure with a washing basket of clothes, you might be tempted to prop the gate open, plus you are not necessarily focused on who else has followed you into the enclosure.   If a child falls into the pool, you may not even be aware so remove the risk by re-locating the clothes line, the family BBQ and dining table as it is far safer for these activities to take place outside the bounds of the pool area.

Separation of Swimming Pool from the Residence

We are still finding 30 years after new laws came into legislation, that there are swimming pools with inadequate or non-existent separation from the Residence.  This home had more than one fully openable sliding glass door and several unrestricted windows that open into the rear yard where a swimming pool has been installed. The entire yard was the “pool enclosure”.  In the yard were several chairs & and air conditioning unit placed below openable windows, a full service bar (indicating adults could be drinking in the vicinity of the pool), a large BBQ, sink, dining table for eight as well as a TV – the full shi-bang!   This is clearly an entertainment area with a pool in it, and it is in no way safe or compliant with any NSW legislation. On top of that, access from the street was not secure – neither gate self-closed or self-latched, so in fact anyone could wander into this area.

The resolution here is to install a new barrier to separate the swimming pool from all other activities, so that children and adults alike would be less likely to fall into the swimming pool and not be noticed, whilst others were distracted.

For any instant query contact Pool Certify