Abigail Taylor is a six year old Minnesota kid who was playing in a wading pool this week when she became trapped by the powerful suction of a single pool drain lacking a protective cover. Horrifically,this suction pulled much of her intestines out through her rectum. Doctors said it was a miracle that she survived, but that she may need to be fed intravenously for the rest of her life.
Unbelievably, it's not the first time this has happened.
Injuries like Abigail's occur when a pool or hot tub has a single drain which is lacking it's protective cover. A child's bottom or other body area may be pulled against such the single large drain hole, forming a seal which may be virtually impossible to break. The US Consumer Product Safety Commission says that over the past 20 years there has been nearly 70 such incidents reported, often resulting in child drownings and other injuries; the true incidence is unknown as not all such events are reported, but the CPSC believes that it may be considerably higher.
These events can be easily avoided by modifications to keep the drain cover securely in place, or by having multiple drains, thus reducing the suction on each one. While the CPSC has tried to work voluntarily with industry to make these simple, sometimes life-saving changes, pool operators are loathe to pay for modifications to old-style drains that appear (to them) to be operating normally and safely. And our legislators, perhaps cowed by anti-regulation rhetoric from the right, have yet to require the changes to avoid such accidents.
One thing I found oddly missing from news reports on this event was the case of Valerie Lakey, who suffered virtually the same devastating injury in North Carolina in 1993. You may remember the name of the lawyer who represented the Lakeys in that successful action: John Edwards. Right-wingers decried that case at the time and did so again in 2004, when he ran as the Democratic Vice Presidential candidate. As you know, the right wing seems to hate such tort actions (except when they or their loved ones are those injured) and have often tried to limit damages in such cases.
If torts were "reformed" the way many Republicans call for and damages were capped to direct economic losses and/or direct medical expenses, then corporations would never have to seriously worry about product liability, and pool owners and manufacturers might find the cost of safety improvements to be greater than their limited financial exposure when things go wrong.
And accidents like Abigail's and Valerie's will keep happening.