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Bounce houses injuries present seasonal variability according to literature. The most frequent seasons are the warmer periods of the year: spring and summer. We observed a rise in the number of lesions during the months of May to December, with a drop from December to March. Another limitation of this study is that the population of our province triples during the summer, exponentially increasing the number of patients who come to the paediatric emergency room

Are inflatable play structures really safe for our children?

L. Corominas

1 Paediatric Orthopaedic Department, Hospital Universitari Son Espases, Palma de Majorca, Spain

A. Fernandez-Ansorena

1 Paediatric Orthopaedic Department, Hospital Universitari Son Espases, Palma de Majorca, Spain

P. Martinez-Cepas

2 Paediatric Orthopaedic Department, Hospital Universitari Son Espases, Palma de Majorca, Spain

J. Sanpera

3 Southmead Hospital, North Bristol Hospital Trust, Bristol, United Kingdom

A. Obieta

2 Paediatric Orthopaedic Department, Hospital Universitari Son Espases, Palma de Majorca, Spain

Abstract

Purpose

The frequency of injuries sustained while playing on inflatable toys such as bouncy castles have rapidly increased. These supposedly safe structures are likely unsafe. The objective of this review was to investigate the risk that these attractions represent and the necessary measures to minimize risk of accidents.

Methods

We conducted a prospective study of 114 patients over a period of one year (2015 to 2016). Demographic data collected included: age, gender, anatomical location and side of involvement as well as supervision of the child whilst on the bouncy castle. The extracted data include mechanism of injury and risk factors, i.e. lack of supervision of the child, amounts of users jumping at the same time.

Results

The injuries were slightly more frequent in male than female children; 2:1 up to six years of age. From the age of ten to 14 years the ration evened to 1:1, the higher incidence in female children was between the ages of six to eight years.

The most common injuries were to the humerus, followed by the distal radius. Only 28% of the parents said they were supervising while the child was jumping.

Conclusion

Injuries associated with inflatable bouncers have increased over time. The main risk factors: were lack of effective adult supervision and the shared use by an excessive number of participants of different ages and weights.

These considerations lead to the conclusion that there is a necessity to enhance child health surveillance and to consider limiting bouncer usage to children over the age of six years, to prevent and control injuries and to minimize their consequences.

Level of Evidence

Introduction

Inflatable bouncers or moon bouncers have grown in popularity over the recent years as they are relatively cheap to acquire, 1 provide a source of entertainment for children and are generally regarded as a safe environment by parents. There are multiple descriptors for inflatable bouncers, including inflatable play structure, bounce house, bouncer and bouncy castle. They are encountered at fairs, festivals and amusement parks as well as at private parties. Restaurants, inns and even hotels, try to attract families with the installation of leisure games for minors, such as playgrounds with various attractions so that the little ones can have fun while adults enjoy a relaxed after-dinner or family celebration. In this respect, the bouncers are an ideal complement for parties and ensure hours of fun at low cost.

However, as their demand has soared, so have accident rates. 2,3 In recent years, there has been a significant increase in the number of children treated in the emergency department (ED) for injuries resulting from the use of these devices (in the United States an injury rate of 5.3/100 000 children has been described). 1

The mechanisms of injuries were: first, a fall, both inside and outside of the bouncy castle; second, a collision between children due to the differences in sizes and ages. 4–6 Also, less frequently yet more severe, were injuries resulting from faults in the anchoring system and wind gusts. 7

The main risk factor was the lack of effective adult supervision, either by the parent or staff responsible for overseeing the attraction. Furthermore, overcrowding by children of different weights and sizes increased exponentially the chances of suffering an accident. 8

We carried out a prospective study of injuries secondary to inflatable play structure accidents that attended the Paediatric Emergency Department at our Hospital Universitario Son Espases. This is the first prospective European study of its kind, which has been conducted in a single referral centre for Paediatric Orthopaedics during a 12-month period (between February 2015 and February 2016). Our hospital is a paediatric referral site for the entire province; patients not only come from the city but from all the municipalities of the province. The population of the province is 1 169 591 inhabitants, with a population proportion corresponding to the age range of 0 to 14 years of 15% ( Fig. 1 ).

Density of inhabitants between 2015 and 2016 in our province (male, left-hand side and female, right-hand side).

The increase of inflatable play-related injuries may be explained by the growth of the inflatables industry, 8 as well as by the lack of prevention measures and initiatives for reducing injury risks.

The aim of this study is to describe the epidemiology, type and chronology of the lesions and ultimately, we would like to outline some safety guidelines for inflatable attractions and alert civil society to the dangers of such facilities, still considered safe by the general public.

Material and methods

Only paediatric patients aged 0 to 14 years, who had experienced trauma in an inflatable play structure, were chosen for the study.

The patients’ parents were informed at arrival to the ED about the study, and they consented to and signed the protocol for data collection.

Demographic data gathered included: age; gender; mechanism of injury (fall inside the inflatable play structure, fall outside the bounce house, collision with another participant, castle displacement); risk factors (lack of responsible supervision, users of different ages); type of injury; medical attention required; and complementary tests.

Adult supervision is defined as the need for vigilance at all times. There must be at least two people supervising the attraction.

The shifts should be respected, either by age, or by height, so that children of different constitution do not use attraction at the same time. The simultaneous use by a large number of people at the same time should be avoided, because it increases the danger of falls and injuries, especially if children of different age ranges and weight are mixed.

Results

Between February 2015 and February 2016, 114 children were treated for inflatable play structure-related injuries.

The distribution of injuries showed a higher frequency in male compared with female children, with a ratio of 2:1 up to six years of age. From the age of ten to 14 years, the ratio evened to 1:1. The age range where the gender ratio is inconsistent is between the ages of six and eight where the incidence is higher in females 1:1.3.

The age peak, independent of gender, was between the ages of six and eight years ( Fig. 2 ).

Graph describing the incidence of lesions by age and gender, registered during a 12-month period at our hospital.

The most commonly injured anatomical region in the upper limb was the humerus, followed by the distal radius. The most common fracture was the supracondylar fracture. In the lower limb, the most common lesion was a sprain, followed by the tibial fracture. Moreover, two patients presented non-displaced lumbar vertebral fractures, in T12 and T10, respectively.

The trauma in the upper limb was more frequent in male compared with female children (ratio 1.3:1), and in the lower limb the ratio was 1.25:1. Both cases of spinal injuries happened to male children. Injuries sustained to the face and head were only observed in girls. There were two cases of traumatic head injuries due to direct collision with another child, and two cases of lesions to the eyebrow ( Fig. 3 ).

Graph describing distribution by gender and anatomical location (upper E, upper extremity; lower E, lower extremity; head injury; spine).

Out of our series, as many as 100 patients who attended ED had an unwitnessed fall, with the parents alerted by the child crying.

Of the 114 children in our study, only 28% of parents said they were supervising while the child was jumping, 25% said they were close to the bouncer but did not observe the fall and 47% said they were not supervising the child, nor in the vicinity of the bouncer, and were subsequently notified of the fall of the child. Of the 53% of the parents who claimed to have been in the vicinity of the castle (both those who observed the fall and those who did not see it), only 40% said that there was a person controlling access to the inflatable play structure.

At the moment of injury, the number of children jumping simultaneously ranged from two to ten. The mentioned mechanisms of injury were either: being hit by other children, or slipping off or falling out of the inflatable structure, or the trapping and twisting of a limb.

In all, 62 patients out of the total were treated non-operatively. These included: contusions, non-displaced fractures and sprains.

However, of the 114 patients, 52 children required admission to hospital for treatment and 50 of them required surgery; including those in the upper extremity. There were 20 supracondylar fractures, 12 of them were supracondylar fractures Garland II, eight supracondylar fractures Garland III and two of them with vascular involvement that required an anterior approach and vascular repair. All of the ten distal radius fractures were reduced under sedation with Ketamine (Ketolar, Madrid, Spain) and Midazolam (Laboratorios Normon, Madrid, Spain) and control of fluoroscope in the operating room. Of ten forearm fractures (including fracture of both bones, or of only one of them), six of them required fixation with flexible intramedullary nailing or Kirschner wires and two radial head fractures needed reduction under anesthesia and control of fluoroscope without internal fixation. Children with humerus fractures required hospitalization more frequently, accounting for 47.7% of the total hospitalizations.

In the lower limb, the six displaced tibia fractures and two femur fractures required surgery, under general anesthesia and fixation with a flexible intramedullary fixation system.

The average hospital stay for fractures that required surgery with internal fixation was two to three days. Those who underwent closed reduction had a stay for 24 hours, to control distal trophism.

The two vertebral fractures were treated orthopaedically with a corset, but required hospital admission for pain control. The average stay was five days.

Discussion

The medical and public health community has made recommendations about the safe use of bouncy castles. Nevertheless, it is also important to involve the political class in order to toughen security controls and enact more comprehensive regularizations. 9

Inflatable play structures appear very attractive to children but this study suggests that they are unsafe. The lack of adult supervision, the use of the facility by participants of different ages and sizes at the same time, as well as overcrowding, are the main risk factors for injuries. As observed in the graphs, there is variability in user age, from two years to ten years old, and as a result, there is often a variety of weights of children playing. It is imperative to insist upon the implementation of guidelines to regulate their use, especially with regards to age, where a minimum age should be set at six years.

With the goal of reducing the number of accidents related to inflatables structures, the European Safety standards UNE-EN 14.960:2014 9 should be complied with at all times. The standard, which is compulsory in many European countries, describes the installation of the castles, safety standards to be taken during the process and the instructions of management and handling. However, in the current Spanish market, not all instalments hold this certificate. Furthermore, the fact that the facility has passed the quality and maintenance control does not guarantee it is safe. 1,10

In Spain, the UNE-EN 14960 standard specifies the safety requirements for inflatable play equipment in which the main activities are bouncing and sliding.

This law regulates both the type and dimensions of the structure, as well as the permitted materials and threads, as well as the inflatable volumes, among other details. On the other side, it also requires the specification of the capacity and the recommended age of use and requires an annual review to certify the safety of the facilities, but in many cases as we have been able to verify in this article, the basic safety measures are not applied.

This has made the law more and more punitive, attributing responsibility of negligence to the peddler, for the damages suffered by a minor in an inflatable play structure.

We recommend that the following measures 2,11,12 should be met to ensure the inflatables are safe for use and that there is a lower amount of injuries associated with these attractions.

There should be responsible adult supervision, paying close attention to the children at play at all times during its use.

The equipment should be set up, operated and supervised by the hire company’s own staff. 2

A rotation system for different age or size groups should be used, together with the observance of an age limit for users. There are special inflatables available for adolescents and adults.

A safety distance of 1 m to 2 m should be kept around the facility, leaving the entrance and exit points free at all times. At the access to the bouncer, there must be a ramp that covers the entire width of the entrance arch. Likewise, there must be some type of material that cushions possible falls, such as mats or foam. A simple carpet is not enough; also, curbs, benches, trees or other accessories should not be present in that area.

The number of children using the bouncy castle must be limited to avoid overcrowding. This will allow each child to have safe space to play in. 13,14

It is forbidden to climb and/or hang from the walls of the inflatable.

Children should not be allowed to use the bouncy castle in adverse weather conditions such as high wind or in wet weather (inflatables can flip over and slippery surfaces may cause injury). It is recommended to deflate the installation when winds exceed 45 km/h.

All children must be made to remove footwear (always wear socks).

Removal of hard or sharp objects such as jewelry, buckles, pens and other similar pocket contents.

The castle must be adequately secured to the ground and sited away from obstacles such as fences or overhead power. They should be regularly inspected while in use.

Writing in Pediatrics, the researchers report that an estimated 64 657 children were treated in EDs around the United States for inflatable bouncer-related injuries between 1990 and 2010, with a mean rate per year of 5.28 injuries per 100 000 children. 15

Over the 15-year period between 1995 and 2010 the rate went up 15-fold, although the increase was more rapid over recent years, with the annual injury number and rate more than doubling between 2008 and 2010. 2,15

In European literature there is an Italian retrospective article 8 for which data of 521 children were collected from 2002 to 2013. In our study, we observe a greater number of children affected in a one-year period compared with the mean annual affected population mentioned in the American and Italian studies.

With this study, we wanted to show the high volume of injuries than can occur with the temporary inflatable attractions/structures which are getting increasingly popular. Currently, bouncy houses and other inflatable structures are not only present at town fairs or local festivities, but are also often rented for private parties and family gatherings. For this reason, it is very important to understand the restrictions of their use and inappropriate and/or faulty facilities. Nevertheless, the good and responsible use of the attractions always requires supervision, as mentioned on several occasions in this study, especially in private events.

This study has certain limitations. Regarding the number of children jumping in unison in a bounce house, we do not know the number of children participating in games on bouncy castles in order to establish a statistic that informs us of the chances of suffering an accident. Nor do we know to what extent the standards of use described by the European Safety standards UNE-EN 14.960:2014 are not met, nor whether they are sufficient. What is certain is that the number of children and the severity of the injuries resulting from these activities that reach the paediatric emergency services are increasing.

Among the measures to be carried out, it seems sensible to restrict use only to children over six years of age, since we found that pre-school children are frequently injured and the ones most often suffering reported fractures of the upper extremity. According to our study, the number of injuries would be reduced by up to 34%.

Another limitation of this study is that the population of our province triples during the summer, exponentially increasing the number of patients who come to the paediatric emergency room

The problem has been exposed. Security technicians need to study improvements of the current procedures and the public administrations need to comply with the standards. Parents should know the risk and possible consequences of these activities.

Conclusions

Bouncy castles are a preventable cause of injury in children. Ensuring that parents are aware of the potential risks, improving surveillance of the injuries, developing national safety guidelines, especially with regards to age, where an age limit should be set to over six years old, and separating children according to size and age, as well as improving bouncer designs, are the first steps to prevent accidents from happening.

Further investigation is needed to define additional preventive and safety guidelines and to characterize the full scope of injuries related to inflatable bounce use, including soft-tissue injuries.

COMPLIANCE WITH ETHICAL STANDARDS

FUNDING STATEMENT

No benefits in any form have been received or will be received from a commercial party related directly or indirectly to the subject of this article.

OA LICENCE TEXT

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed.

ETHICAL STATEMENT

Ethical approval: This article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by any of the authors.

ICMJE CONFLICT OF INTEREST STATEMENT

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thank you to Dr. Francisca Yagüe MD and Dr. Victoria Corominas MD, for encouraging us to write this article. Both are doctors in the paediatric emergency department of our hospital.

Lee Chin’s comments on NHL culture blow up a storm in Canada

‘Enough beer to shock an Irishman. Now, that’s something’ - Ice Hockey pundits

“Enough beer to shock an Irishman, it seems. Now, that’s something.”

Lee Chin’s comments about being surprised at the level of drinking and fighting in professional ice hockey has caused quite a stir in Canada.

Chin’s claims about the drinking culture, and players drinking 24 hours before a match - have irked a number of NHL reporters. But his claim’s about a “change-up” - in which players enduring a slump in form are encouraged to “basically go out and ruin himself for the night, then come back the next day, with the attitude of you just don’t care” - have been questioned.

The ruining themselves part involves being sent out to “drink 20 pints, go off with a couple of women, whatever he wants. And come back the next day. That’s the way they live. It’s the culture, what they believe in, letting off steam like that. I don’t know if they look at the science behind it.”

The comments have led to the president of the Vancouver Canucks - who the Wexford hurler spent a week with as part of the Toughest Trade RTÉ series - issuing a statement to deny the claims:

“Our team recently accepted a request from Lee Chin and a TV show for access to an individual on-ice skills session and a game with Canucks alumni,” Linden said.

“We were disappointed to learn of the comments made in an Irish Times article about his experience. The assumptions made by Lee Chin on hockey culture and reported by The Irish Times are baseless and categorically false. They do not reflect our players, their conduct or the culture of our game in any way.”

Lee Chin talks about his NHL experience

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An angry Jason Botchford, who covers the Canucks for the Vancouver Province, feels that Chin’s claims have little substance given the small amount of time he spent with the first team.

“Who could make up a story like this? Well, it seems Lee Chin can. There’s just one problem. Chin spent very little time with current Canucks and a whole bunch of time with the team’s alumni.”

Not only does Botchford question the validity of Chin’s claims about a change-up, but he’s not at all happy about the drinking culture claims.

“Generally, (the player’s) bodies are independent, money-making, finely tuned machines. That’s not to say they don’t consume alcohol. I mean, some don’t. But others will have a beer, gasp, the day before a game without concern.

“If you’re incredulous that a grown man had a beer more than 24 hours before a hockey game, you’re definitively clueless.

“About as clueless as someone who gets a chance of a lifetime to spend a week with an NHL team only to later rat out the team with some partial truth and some fake news.”

Stern words indeed. Daniel Wagner from the Vancouver Courier was pleased with Chin’s view on the fighting culture. In particular the phrase, “If a guy is acting the maggot he has to pay for his actions.”

But again, he doesn’t see the issue with the drinking 24 hours before a game - “the drinking the day before a game isn’t the scandalous part of this, except for perhaps that they were drinking Heineken. Come on, guys. There is an argument to be made that elite athletes should avoid alcohol as it impacts training and can make you more injury-prone, but no one’s getting up in arms about a beer with lunch.”

Wagner feels the quotes about a “change-up” may have been exaggerated, but unlike Botchford he knows there is no smoke without fire.

“Let’s be clear: this story came from somewhere. This doesn’t seem like something he would just make up on the spot. Perhaps the Canucks players exaggerated their drinking exploits in hopes of impressing their new Irish friend, buying into the stereotype or Irish drinking.

“And since Chin spent time with Canucks alumni, it’s possible that he was told stories of the “old days” that he misunderstood as applying to now. Perhaps a “change-up” was a tradition in NHL locker rooms decades ago, who knows?”

Sportsnet’s Dan Murphy, who travels with the Canucks also tweeted: “Been around the team a long time, never heard a whisper about a change-up. 20 pints. Caman..”

Chin swapped places with former Vancouver Canucks goalkeeper Alex Auld, who also spent a week in Wexford hurling with Lee’s club, Faythe Harriers. The Toughest Trade airs on RTE at 10.35 on Friday night.

Forest Fires and Climate Change

Doug Findlater, mayor of West Kelowna, recalls seeing the 2003 Okanagan Mountain Park fire sweep into town: “It kind of looked like a war movie, with houses blowing up all over the place,” he says. More recently, Canadians watched with horror as the immense Fort McMurray fire of 2016 threatened the city. The Fort Mac fire caused the evacuation of almost 90,000 people and quickly became the most expensive natural disaster in Canadian history, destroying 2400 buildings and causing about $10 billion in damage. [ 1 ]

Forest fires make headlines across Canada every summer. They regularly devastate millions of acres of forest [ 2 ] and sometimes threaten entire communities with sudden, catastrophic violence. Destructive fires have an enduring impact on the community that lingers long after people return home to resume their lives. Findlater speaks from experience when he says “life is never quite the same again after you’ve been evacuated.” The extraordinary danger and lasting impacts of wildfire explain why we spend so much money – about a billion dollars a year – fighting it. [ 3 ]

Fire is a seasonal summer threat because it can only start, intensify, and spread in hot, dry weather. Findlater reflects that “as a mayor, I don’t really look forward to summer in the way most people do.” He notes that as climate change brings on longer, drier summers, Canadians will have to live with more and more risk of more and more serious wildfires, and that we have to take decisive steps to manage the growing danger.

Climate Change and Fire Weather

When forest fire researcher Mike Flannigan looks ahead at what climate change means for wildfires in Canada, he doesn’t beat around the bush: “in a word, the future is smoky.”

Flannigan has been studying fire for over thirty years. He’s researched the key ingredients of destructive wildfires – fuel, ignition, and weather – all over the world. His work, and the work of hundreds of other researchers, shows that climate change is predicted to worsen all three ingredients across most of Canada, making global warming a triple threat to our forests.

Read More: Fire's important natural role

Wildfire is a natural part of the boreal forest life cycle. Fires help clear litter from the forest floor, recycle nutrients back into the soil, open up gaps in tree stands to promote new growth, and kill invasive species and forest pests. The heat from forest fires is even needed by some trees, such as the Jack Pine, for reproduction. When fire meets human civilization, however, it becomes a dangerous or catastrophic threat.

When he considers what’s in store for Canada, Flannigan says simply that “There is a lot more fire in the future, and we better get used to it.” More and more Canadians are living, working, and playing in Canada’s forests. That means more people are likely to be affected by larger and larger fires – even catastrophic ones. “Was Fort McMurray a one-off?” Flannigan muses: “Heavens, no.”

To figure out what climate change means for forest fires in Canada, Flannigan and a team of researchers at the Canadian Forest Service analyzed the findings of almost 50 international studies on climate change and fire risk. [ 4 ] They found that our future looks “smoky” because climate change will worsen the three major factors that influence wildfire: having dry fuel to burn, frequent lightning strikes that start fires, and dry, windy weather that fans the flames.

Another recent study [ 5 ] by Flannigan and several other scientists predicts that western Canada will see a 50% increase in the number of dry, windy days that let fires start and spread, whereas eastern Canada will see an even more dramatic 200% to 300% increase in this kind of “fire weather.” Other studies predict that fires could burn twice as much average area per year in Canada by the end of the century as has burned in the recent past. [ 6 ]

Warm weather can dry out the landscape very quickly. The drier grasses, brush, and trees get, the more likely they are to both catch fire and to stay burning. Global warming has a direct and obvious effect on this risk by raising temperatures, which will dry out vegetation more quickly and more thoroughly. The presence of all this dry fuel will allow more fires to start and then burn farther and wider.

It takes only a few hot days to create fire conditions, even when there have been recent downpours and even flooding. For example, in British Columbia, the 2017 fire season smashed wildfire records for the largest total area burnt, and this record was smashed again only one year later in 2018. [ 7 ] This catastrophic summer of fire immediately followed a spring of rainstorms and floods. These seemingly contradictory dangers overlapped, leading the Okanagan emergency operations centre to warn residents not to be complacent about fire risks because of the flooding. [ 8 ]

Climate change is predicted to cause large increases in the number of very hot days across the country (see our map of +30°C days). This means our forests are likely to become much more flammable from coast to coast to coast.

Climate change can also promote forest fires in less direct ways. [ 9 ] In BC and Alberta, warming temperatures are enabling the dramatic spread of the mountain pine beetle, which has affected more than 180,000 square kilometres of forest (an area larger than all of Greece). [ 10 ] These beetles kill their host trees, and have created vast swaths of standing deadwood which are now huge reservoirs of wildfire fuel. The pine beetle is only one of many damaging forest pests that are likely to spread thanks to warmer winters caused by climate change. [ 11 ]

See our “Forest Pests and Climate Change” article for more on insect risks.

All the dry grass and wood in the world won’t become a wildfire if nothing sets it ablaze. As Mike Flannigan points out, “Forest fires are caused by two things: lightning and people.”

Unfortunately, rising temperatures promote the development of more storms capable of producing lightning, the chief cause of forest fires in remote areas, and more than half of wildfires overall. [ 12 ] Scientists working from climate models conservatively predict an 80% increase in the number of lightning strikes in Canada by the end of the century. [ 6 ]

Canada has averaged over 7000 forest fires per year since 1990. [ 13 ] More than half are caused by lightning, so a near-doubling of lightning strikes could push us to almost 9,000 fires per year by the end of the century.

The third element that determines the severity of wildfire is dry, windy weather: conditions that Mike Flannigan calls “fire weather”. Dry heat helps create more fuel to burn, and wind both spreads wildfire more rapidly and makes it much harder to put out.

Climate change is stacking the deck so that hot, dry and windy weather shows up more frequently than it used to. Surprisingly, one reason for this increase is the rising temperature of the Arctic.

Although the Arctic is very far away, its climate has dramatic effects on the weather of southern Canada. The far north of Canada is warming much faster than the south, and as the Arctic warms up, the jet stream slows down and meanders. [ 14 ] This means that weather that would normally pass by in a day or two tends to stay put for much longer, causing flooding (if rainstorms persist for days or weeks) and drought (when hot, dry weather just doesn’t let up).

So, global warming creates higher temperatures that make more dry fuel available to burn and also results in more persistent hot and dry fire weather that lets fires intensify and spread.

Warmer weather is also causing earlier snow melt and later fall frosts, which are expanding the fire season, or the range of time when the weather is warm enough and dry enough for fires to occur. All across the country, fire season is starting earlier and lasting longer. Flannigan notes that the Alberta fire season begins a full month earlier than it used to, at the beginning of March rather than April.

See our map of projected changes in the Frost-Free Season across Canada to see how the fire season might expand.

Mitigation

There’s a vicious cycle connecting forest fires and climate change: warmer temperatures make fires more likely, and burning forests release greenhouse gas pollution that makes global warming worse. [ 15 ]

This means that overall efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and slow global warming will also help prevent forest fires. And on the other hand, working to reduce the number and severity of forest fires will also help slow climate change.

Many aspects of wildfire are out of our control, but as Flannigan notes: “every human-caused fire is preventable.” And Findlater reports that many of the recent fires near Kelowna have been caused by human carelessness. A world of ever-increasing fire risks and consequences will demand more fire bans and forest closures as well as more innovative and life-long fire education to reduce the number of human-caused fires.

Adaptation

How do we “get used to” a world with much more wildfire?

Fortunately, there are a number of things individuals and municipalities can do to reduce fire risk. Fire Smart [https://www.firesmartcanada.ca] guidelines are available for individuals and for community leaders. Municipalities can create and maintain fire buffers around and within their communities by bulldozing trees, removing built-up forest litter, and making creative use of parks and open spaces as fire breaks. Findlater would like to see provincial regulation of fuel-rich private land, requiring better management that will reduce fire risk to the community as a whole. And individual homeowners and businesses can design buildings with fire safety in mind, for example avoiding the use of flammable materials in construction and landscaping.

Fire is inevitable, and climate change will make it more common and more dangerous: it only makes sense to plan how we build, work, and live near forests with fire safety in mind.

We also need to adapt our wildfire response strategies to a world of more frequent, more intense fires. Natural Resources Canada estimates the fire protection costs could double in Canada by 2040 as we attempt to keep up with the worsening risk. [ 3 ] Flannigan argues that remote fires should be allowed to run their course by burning freely without human interference. Concentrating fire-fighting budgets and capacity on wildfires that directly threaten human lives and livelihoods will prevent the most catastrophic impacts, naturally reduce the buildup of dry fuel in the wilderness, and prevent firefighting costs from growing wildly out of control along with our worsening forest fires.

Many effective and innovative firefighting strategies are already in place. Findlater suggests that excellent systems have been created to share emergency-response leadership and resources across regions, provinces, and the entire country. He notes that British Columbia’s regional emergency management services are getting better and better at coordinating their wildfire response: but “sad to say,” it’s because “we’ve had a lot of practice.”

Justin Trudeau Gets Call From Biden as Canada and U.S. Mend Relations

Canadians welcome a renewed relationship with the United States after tolerating four years of insults and threats from the Trump administration.

Trudeau Says He’s Looking Forward to Working with Biden

Ahead of his phone call with President Biden, Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau said he would express his concerns about job loss caused by the cancellation of the Keystone XL oil pipeline.

Obviously, the decision on Keystone XL is a very difficult one for workers in Alberta and Saskatchewan, who’ve had many difficult hits over the past years. We have been there for them. We will continue to be there for them. And I will express my concern for their jobs and livelihoods in Canada, particularly in the West, directly in my conversation with President Biden. But I think the fact that we have so much alignment, not just me and President Biden, but Canadians and President Biden, on values of creating jobs and prosperity for everyone, and opportunities for everyone. Investing in the fight against climate change as a way of growing the economy. It’s not always going to be perfect alignment with the United States. That’s the case with any given president. But in a situation where we are much more aligned on values, on focus, on the work that needs to be done to give opportunities for everyone while we build a better future, I’m very much looking forward to working with President Biden.

TORONTO — We’re friends again!

That was the prevailing mood in Canada this week after the inauguration of President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.

After four years of being insulted, threatened, dismissed and slapped by the Trump administration, shellshocked Canadians felt the once-familiar warmth of their neighbor and closest ally, the United States. Of all the world leaders with whom Mr. Biden has to kiss and make up, Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, was the first to get an official phone call, on Friday evening.

During the call, which lasted more than 30 minutes, the leaders agreed to meet next month “to advance the important work of renewing the deep and enduring friendship between Canada and the United States,” according to a summary released by Mr. Trudeau’s office.

“We have so much alignment — not just me and President Biden, but Canadians and President Biden,” Mr. Trudeau said earlier Friday, in a news conference outside his home. “Talk again soon, Joe,” he said on Twitter after the call.

The profound sense of relief that the American election evoked across Canada was further deepened by Mr. Biden’s inaugural speech, in which he promised to repair alliances and engage with the world not through force, but partnership.

But, as is often the case with make-ups, it will take some time to rebuild trust and resolve differences between the two countries. And the United States is a very different place than it was four years ago: deeply divided, sick and weakened by the coronavirus, with an economic outlook adopted by Mr. Biden that emphasizes American jobs.

It also didn’t help that one of his first moves was to cancel the Keystone XL — a proposed pipeline meant to carry crude oil from Alberta to Nebraska that the Canadian oil industry hoped would revive its sinking fortunes.

“It was not a friendly first act,” said Roland Paris, a professor of international affairs at the University of Ottawa, and a former foreign policy adviser to Mr. Trudeau. But, he added, “Just knowing the occupant of the White House will treat Canada as a respected friend makes a huge difference.”

Canada has long considered itself a close cousin to the United States. The two countries share a similar colonial history, immigrant population, defense network, economic supply chains and culture. Two-thirds of Canada’s sparse population live within 60 miles of the American border, and, before the pandemic, crossed it regularly to shop and visit family.

“We’ve forged a bond that is beyond practical,” said Allan Rock, a former longtime minister in the Canadian government. “It borders on mystical.”

Then-President Donald J. Trump with Mr. Trudeau at the Oval Office in 2019. The two leaders had a rocky relationship throughout Mr. Trump’s term.

Historically, the Canadian prime minister has received if not the first, then among the first foreign visits by a new American president. But, since the coronavirus has made such visits difficult, the first phone call should be seen as a stand-in, said Bruce Heyman, a former U.S. ambassador to Canada. “It’s definitely a big deal,” he said from his home in Chicago. “To get the first call is a recognition of the importance of the relationship.”

As with any family, there have been disagreements, and Canadians have often felt overlooked by their much larger neighbor. But in modern history, nothing has approached the blowups instigated by former President Donald J. Trump.

He slapped tariffs on Canadian products, threatened to rip up the country’s most important trade deal and insulted Mr. Trudeau as “very dishonest and weak.” His trade adviser Peter Navarro went further, suggesting “there’s a special place in hell” for Canada’s prime minister.

Few Canadians were sad to see the Trump administration go.

“There is actually a special place in hell for Trump,” said Gary Doer, a former Canadian ambassador to Washington and Manitoba premier.

Mr. Doer is among the many Canadians who expect the return of that once-special relationship under a Biden administration. Some even envision Canada helping the United States mend other relationships.

But the pictures of a mob breaking into the Capitol on Jan. 6, and the deep and ugly divisions it revealed in the United States, is a source of worry for many.

If America’s “rift becomes more rancorous and deeper, then we are in trouble,” said Kathleen Wynne, the first female and openly gay premier of Ontario, Canada’s most populous province. Far-right activists have been emboldened in Canada too, she noted, recalling being followed and harassed by “very, very hard core right-wing angry men” during her 2018 re-election campaign, which she lost.

“We need to see that dissipate in the United States,” she said. “That’s Biden’s first order of business. To take a breath, and not preach to people, but try to figure out how to weave back the social fabric” of the country.

She added, “It’s a huge task.”

Mr. Trudeau and Mr. Biden have a warm history. The prime minister was host at a farewell state dinner for the then outgoing vice president four years ago, after Mr. Trump’s victory. Mr. Biden gave a speech then, during which he said it was up to Canada to be the defending champion of the “liberal international order.” He ended with a toast: “Vive le Canada. Because we need you very, very badly.”

Both leaders have made combating climate change, defending human rights and strengthening international institutions central to their platforms. They built their political personas on inclusivity and social justice — although at 49, Mr. Trudeau is a generation younger than Mr. Biden.

Mr. Rock, who also served as Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations, said he hoped Mr. Trudeau would offer his assistance to Mr. Biden, in rebuilding American relationships around the world. “Their first conversation, I hope includes the words, ‘How can we help?’” Mr. Rock said. “We aren’t the ones who behaved as Mr. Trump did. We have reasonable currency in the capitals of the world.”

Some in the country worried Mr. Biden’s proposed protectionist economic policies could damage the Canadian economy so intrinsically dependent on the United States. But, even Conservative Canadian politicians anticipate a renewed and strengthened relationship.

The premier of Alberta, Jason Kenney, who called the cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline a “gut punch,” welcomed the new administration, adding that his province had “the deepest economic ties to the United States and strong social connections that go back well over a century.”

When inevitable disagreements arise with the Biden administration, most Canadian politicians expect a return to rational and respectful discourse, which after years of dodging grenade attacks over Twitter, would seem a balm.

“I can’t wait to go back to Washington, DC to work with the new Administration and Congress on our common interests,” tweeted Flavio Volpe, the president of the Auto Parts Manufacturers Association, who spent four years working with the Canadian government to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement.

He added: “Happy New Beginnings, America.”

Dan Bilefsky contributed reporting from Montreal and Ian Austen from Ottawa.

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Blackout Hits Ontario and Seven US States

This article was originally published in Maclean’s magazine on August 25, 2003. Partner content is not updated.

IT TOOK just nine seconds to turn the clock back a century. A voltage fluctuation in some Ohio transmission lines. Then, at 4:11 p.m. n a muggy August Thursday, a faster-than-you-can-blink reversal in the flow of current, suddenly sucking away a city's worth of power from the eastern half of the continent.

Blackout Hits Ontario and Seven US States

IT TOOK just nine seconds to turn the clock back a century. A voltage fluctuation in some Ohio transmission lines. Then, at 4:11 p.m. on a muggy August Thursday, a faster-than-you-can-blink reversal in the flow of current, suddenly sucking away a city's worth of power from the eastern half of the continent. Computerized safety systems kicked in and 100 generating stations across Ontario and seven U.S. states were knocked off-line like tumbling dominoes. The lights went out, air conditioners stopped humming, television and radio stations fell silent, subways, streetcars, and elevators shuddered to a halt. Fifty million people looked at their watches, flipped suddenly useless power switches, and began a long, hot wait for someone to restore the natural order.

Not a surprise, exactly. We've all experienced blackouts before. And in power-starved Ontario, where 10 million citizens found themselves unplugged, the experts had long been predicting summer shortages. But as the minutes ticked by and the scope of the problem became clear - no electricity from Ottawa to Windsor, major American cities like New York, Detroit and Cleveland also at a standstill - there was a kernel of dread. In Manhattan, with the second anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks looming, that fear quickly came to the surface. "The first thing I thought was, 'Oh my God, this is another terrorist attack,' " says Henry Flesh, who works in the 30th-floor offices of a large publishing company. "We looked out on the streets, saw a lot of people outside, and couldn't figure out what was going on. We didn't have a radio with batteries, and some people got pretty scared. Some were joking and I was trying to joke, too, but underneath it all I thought, 'Geez, we could be about to be blown up in a few minutes.' "

In Toronto, thousands found themselves trapped in elevators and the city's subway. It took fire and transit officials hours to free them all. "The car became pretty sweaty, and after about 20 minutes it got really hot and very hard to breathe. There were people who were running back and forth between the cars - I think they might have been claustrophobic," says Adam Durbin, a 22-year-old student, who was heading home when the blackout hit. "I just wanted to get the hell off the train. Nobody on board was really talking about what had happened because nobody knew anything. We were all just concentrating on not passing out because it was so hot down there."

Above the surface, the scene was no less chaotic. Sidewalks overflowed with transit users forced to take to shank's pony. With all of the city's 1,773 traffic lights out of service, and streetcars stopped dead in the tracks, vehicles gridlocked within minutes, despite the best efforts of good Samaritan citizens directing traffic. TTC worker Malcolm MacPherson donned a reflective vest and leapt into action at one busy intersection. "Amazingly, the drivers were obeying me," he says. "They'd beep their horns and some of them handed me bottles of water."

As the afternoon turned to evening, emergency officials across the blackout zone braced for the worst, but were faced with remarkably few problems. There were crimes of opportunity - small-scale larceny in parts of Brooklyn, N.Y., a jewellery store robbery on Ottawa's Sparks Street, just 30 minutes after the power went off, 23 cases of looting in the capital, and 208 break-and-enters in Toronto, about six times the usual nightly total - but nothing compared to infamous blackouts past. In Detroit, officials ordered an 11 p.m. curfew for teenagers and delivered blunt warnings of hefty jail terms for troublemakers: "Before you pick up a brick and throw it, before you tip over a car, before you take a TV, you better ask yourself, is this worth 10 years of my life?" the local prosecutor told a news conference. But there were few arrests. The biggest challenge came in Cleveland, where 1.5 million people were left without drinking water when backup power went down at local treatment plants. The National Guard was quickly pressed into service to distribute more that 6.3 million litres to thirsty residents.

Among the most affected were travellers. The blackouts closed or partially shut down 12 major airports in Canada and the United States. Domestic flights were cancelled, and incoming international planes diverted. Toronto's Pearson International not only had to contend with power outages, but the complete collapse of Air Canada's computerized control centre. The struggling airline ended up cancelling more than 500 flights, leaving thousands stranded in terminals around the world. Rick and Helen Bailey, travelling home to Edmonton after visiting family in St. John's, Nfld., were stuck at Pearson for more than 48 hours. "We were on a flight that was supposed to leave Newfoundland at 9 a.m., but the plane blew a hydraulic part so they flew a new one in," says Rick. The couple got to Toronto just as the lights went out. Their connecting flight was cancelled, and like thousands of others, they were left to fend for themselves. "We said what about hotels - they told us we're on our own." The Baileys bedded down in the terminal. "I didn't even want to guess where our suitcases were," says Rick.

Hospital patients, people with debilitating illnesses and the disabled also faced more discomfort than most, but health institutions rose - occasionally heroically - to the challenge. In Hamilton, city employees worked frantically through the first hours of the crisis to route emergency power to the Regional Cancer Centre, so that two leukemia patients could complete radiation treatments before life-saving stem cell transplants.

But mostly, people just made do. In many affected communities a carnival atmosphere took over. People made the rounds of neighbours to chat, took to backyards to barbecue and admire the stars, or found refuge in candlelit bars and restaurants. Toronto's Brent Turnbull and his fiancée, Kelly Jones, filled a spill-proof camping bottle with wine, hopped on their bikes and cycled around the city. On the journey they discovered an impromptu picnic party with people cooking dinner on propane camping stoves in a park, and an outdoor dance in an alley of a downtown street, where a DJ was spinning records with the aid of a small generator. "You could see the top of the CN Tower and it was so amazing - the moon was on the left and Mars was on the right," says Turnbull, 34. "When the street lights came on after a few hours, a huge cheer went up and then there was this pregnant pause, and people started saying 'Turn them back off!' The magic was gone. But I think that's what we'll call it: the perfect night."

By late Friday night, most American cities had fully restored power, and were already returning to normal - major-league baseball and NFL exhibition games went ahead as scheduled in Cleveland - leaving many Ontarians to wonder why they were still in the dark. In Toronto, where the power situation remained precarious throughout the weekend, and the venerable Canadian National Exhibition was forced to postpone its opening, Premier Ernie EVES warned of rolling blackouts and more trouble ahead. "We don't have an abundance of power," he said. "So I encourage industry and commercial and office facilities not to use power you don't need to use." The greatest threat, however, might be to Eves and his Tory government, who must call an election in the coming months. Opposition parties are already trying to make them wear the blame for the blackout, just the latest crisis to befall the province's crumbling and deeply indebted electricity system.

Prime Minister Jean Chrétien and U.S. President George W. Bush have already pledged to set up a joint task force to probe the cause of the blackout and the security of North America's highly interconnected POWER grid. "You can't blame anyone. It happened," Chrétien said, perhaps wishfully. "Fifty million people have been involved in this problem, and what is great is the people have kept their calm and accepted fate very graciously."

Critics, however, are already pointing to government policies in both the United States and Canada that have led to less money being spent on refurbishing outdated power infrastructure. "We're a superpower with a Third World grid. We need a new grid," said former U.S. energy secretary Bill Richardson, now the governor of New Mexico. Some observers are suggesting that Ontario and the affected states need to radically rethink their systems, given the failure of multiple safety measures that were supposed to keep the lights on, and go back to smaller generating stations that service each local area. After all, this isn't the first time such widespread failures have blacked out eastern North America. There is even an international body - the North American Electric Reliability Council - charged with preventing such events. Its president, Michehl R. Gent, said he is as confused as everyone else. "If we've designed the system for this not to happen, how did it happen?" he told reporters. "I can't answer that question. I'm embarrassed." Honest, but not exactly the illuminating response 50 million were hoping for.

The Downside of Interconnection

Much of the electricity grid desperately needs updating to handle enormous and expanding energy needs
THINK BLACK HOLE, sucking in whatever's within its grasp. The biggest blackout the continent has ever seen may have had its beginnings between 3 and 4 p.m. last Thursday. That's when several transmission lines near Cleveland lost their power, creating a demand from customers along those lines. That drew in electricity in surges from ever-expanding sectors of the interconnected North American power grid. As sector after sector in turn saw their supply suddenly fall short of demand on a hot, air-conditioned summer afternoon, they sucked in power from the next sector. The rolling imbalance overwhelmed transmission services along the grid and at 4:11, the shutdown hit. As sectors automatically switched off to protect themselves from potentially damaging surges, the power died across most of Ontario and seven states, the lights went out - and the rumours flew.

Was it terrorism? A burning generator in Manhattan? Fire at a Pennsylvania nuclear plant? A lightning strike on a generator in the Niagara region? Clearly, proclaimed American commentators and politicians, something had gone wrong in Canada. Not here, Canadian government and electricity industry leaders countered, it had to be something in the States - if not Manhattan, maybe Ohio?

Terrorism was quickly ruled out, but the big question mark remained. As both sides announced a joint task force to determine the blackout's cause, suspicions began to focus on what's known as the Lake Erie loop: transmission lines carrying power around that lake in both countries. That would jibe with the Cleveland theory. But whatever the cause, one thing was clear: a grid system that allows jurisdictions to import power from others when they're short, and share some when they're flush, can also implode when it's overloaded.

Ontario's electricity grid - with its 28,000 km of high-voltage lines - is interconnected with grids covering vast parts of the U.S. and Canada east of the Rockies. Only Texas and Quebec have fully buffered their systems, rendering them immune to potentially disabling surges. Quebec has spent billions over the past decade to achieve electricity self-reliance. Which highlights the dilemma throughout the rest of the antiquated grid - much of it desperately needs updating to handle enormous and expanding energy needs. The price tag: at least $50 billion, possibly much worse.

By Saturday, with New York City already back to normal, Toronto still struggled to get electricity back to some pockets. As Ontario's opposition parties crowed that they've seen something like this coming for years, the Tory government had some deciding to do. It's a critical issue - Ontario has become a regular importer of electricity, so unless its citizens suddenly develop an uncharacteristic taste for conservation, the grid system has to work. But an election has to be called soon. Is this when a government admits things aren't working, and commits the billions it'll take to ensure that the province's lights stay on?

Power politics and the Ontario Conservatives

Ernie Eves seems to have the worst political luck
WHERE WERE YOU when the lights went out? Ontario Premier Ernie Eves was on his way to his own nomination meeting in picturesque Caledon East, the prelude to an election call - and now likely a victory - that seems always to be eluding his grasp. Taking heat for not living up to the Rudy Giuliani standard of immediate crisis management, the premier may yet be forgiven for trying to get all his facts straight before reaching out to Ontarians four hours after the massive outage. After all, Ottawa did itself no international favours when Prime Minister Jean Chrétien and Defence Minister John McCallum, the man in charge of emergency preparedness, pointed fingers at all sorts of imaginary U.S. targets. (Even as U.S. figures were pointing northward.)

Still, for hard-luck Ernie, Thursday's big blackout was the political equivalent of being stuck in an elevator nowhere near an accommodating floor. But that's what you get for playing loose with a system that needs more than crossed fingers to keep the juice flowing.

When Eves, a former finance minister, took over Mike Harris's ideologically bumptious Tory government in the spring of 2002, he also inherited its plan to privatize the power system, the once almighty ONTARIO HYDRO. But when electricity prices spiked a year ago, Eves did an about-face. He iced privatization plans and capped rates at their old levels (well below rising market cost) for homeowners and small businesses. And that had three consequences: it turned off investors who wanted to start private utilities; it dug a huge hole in provincial finances to account for ongoing subsidies; and it gave Eves political ownership of a stultified electrical grid (with two large reactors out of commission) that had grown overly dependent on imported power.

All summer, as Conservative operatives tested the waters for an election call, they prayed for damp, cool weather so as not to create the rolling California-style brownouts that might roil bedrock voters. The darndest thing was: they almost made it.

In many ways, Ernie Eves is a nice stentorian fellow from middle Ontario who seems to have the worst political luck, or judgment, of any leader in recent memory. A planned election call in the spring, on the heels of a purportedly balanced budget, was derailed over the controversy of delivering the budget away from the legislature. A summer window was shut when a second minister went down in a blaze of personal overspending. And now, as the premier was contemplating the David Peterson feint - call the vote in the dog days of August so voters are spared tuning in until after Labour Day - he was hit by an imposing darkness. With rolling electricity-sharing brownouts now official Ontario policy for weeks to come, Eves would appear to have little choice but to head back to Queen's Park for a fall session. It's not been a particularly hospitable environment. But if you're going to redesign the province's backbone power system, it is the place to start.

Memories of a long, cold electricity outage

Remembering the ice storm of 1998
THERE IS ONE THING worse than sweating, power-less, in the dark, as most Quebecers know, and it is freezing in the dark. Here, we tend to lose power in the middle of winter, when the nights last 16 hours, and the temperature dips into the flash-freeze zone. Deciding to sleep overnight on the sidewalk in such conditions - as many New Yorkers did last Thursday night - could be the last decision you'd ever make.

Bad as the great blackout was, chances are the memories of the inconvenience will soon fade away. But if you lived through the ICE STORMS of January 1998, it is impossible to forget them. The strange, motionless beauty of frost-covered tree limbs on empty streets; the King Kongesque vision of huge pylons toppled over. Men died falling off roofs they were trying to de-ice to save their houses from collapse, old folks died of cold or carbon monoxide poisoning; families, whole towns, camped in school gyms for weeks on end. Three million people in the St. Lawrence and Ottawa valleys went without power, some for as long as 33 days; 30 deaths were blamed on the storm.

Downtown Montreal was cordoned off, the towers covered with ice that fell in large slabs and landed with a crash, breaking the silence in the streets. Police cruisers, idle with lights flashing, sat at every intersection. At the time I was the executive producer of Global Quebec, which had gone on the air just weeks before, and everyone was working day and night to keep up with the story of a lifetime - oblivious to the fact that our market had vanished. Virtually no one in our viewing area could watch TV. But life had stopped making any sense.

So, Montreal had power while Toronto's luck failed last week - and, yes, some people here were betting on the moment when Mayor Mel Lastman would call in the army, for ice cubes and cold pop. Quebec was spared because, as Premier Jean Charest was quick to point out, it has been there before. Following major blackouts in the 1980s and then the traumatic ice storms of 1998, HYDRO-QUÉBEC pumped $3 billion into upgrading its power grid. We are self-sufficient, and our system has the equivalent of big, big fuses that protect us from whatever aberration hampers our neighbours' antiquated, overworked systems.

Charest's matter-of-fact announcement that our system is better than their systems did not send Quebec off on a bombastic, nationalist boasting spree - proof once more that the Parti Québécois era is indeed over. Reporters and the public were just befuddled to learn that, for once, our government had made the right decision and done the right thing with our money. As a result, Quebec was able to move 50 emergency generators into Ontario early Friday, and divert 1,000 megawatts of electricity to Ontario and New York state - hoping the neighbours will remember these gestures next time we freeze alone in the dark.

Inflatable pools

Avoiding backyard danger

Last Updated September 26, 2006

CBC News

It wasn't that long ago that it would cost you a small fortune to pay for the luxury of a cool dip on a hot day in your own backyard – unless you were satisfied with standing ankle-deep in your kids' plastic froggie pool.

But, over the past few years, new pool technology has made beating the heat affordable for far more people.

They're called inflatable pools and they sell for anywhere from $50 to around $1,000. Unlike the old rigid above-ground pools, they're a snap to install. You just lay the pool on a flat surface, inflate it and fill it with water. The pools are made of durable PVC and are designed to last for several seasons.

It's the same kind of pool that was set up in the backyard of a home in Joliette, Que., on May 14, 2006 – Mother's Day. The next morning, a four-year-old boy was found floating face down in the pool. Efforts to revive him failed and he was pronounced dead at hospital.

"People don't think that [inflatable pools are] dangerous," Edith Lemay of the Quebec branch of the Canadian Red Cross told CBC News. "You can buy it pretty cheap, it's really easy to set up, and they don't think you need to fence it off."

Any pool that can't be emptied easily should be surrounded by a fence with a self-locking gate, Lemay said.

Bylaws covering fences around pools vary from municipality to municipality across the country – and not all cover inflatable pools. The Red Cross recommends that fences be at least two metres high and surround the pool completely. The house should not be part of the pool enclosure. As well, gates should be self-latching and self-closing so it's not accidentally left open.

The boy's death prompted the Red Cross to issue a warning about inflatable pools. The agency notes that drowning remains one of the leading causes of death for children under the age of five. In 2002, 13 Canadian children drowned in family pools. The vast majority were alone when they got into trouble.

"Inflatable pools pose the same dangers as any back-yard pool, especially for young children," Michele Mercier, National Manager of Water Safety for the Canadian Red Cross said in a news release. "Supervision and fencing must be a priority to ensure these pools result in summer fun rather than tragedy."

In February 2006, Consumer Reports magazine listed inflatable pools as one of eight products not to buy for kids. The magazine said the pools are too big too empty everyday and too inexpensive for parents to consider surrounding with a permanent fence. "So they sit unattended in the backyard," the magazine said, "a drowning hazard."

It's not just toddlers who are at risk when it comes to inflatable pools. On July 17, 2005, a 13-year-old Quebec girl died when her long hair got caught in the pump of a relative's pool filter. In most pools, the filter intake is located near the surface of the water. In an inflatable pool, the intake can be 30 centimetres below the surface.

After that incident, the Quebec coroner's office warned owners of inflatable pools to make sure filter intakes are covered with screens.

Health Canada issued a warning after that incident, offering these tips for inflatable pool safety:

Read all instructions before installing, filling and using the pool. Carry out regular pool maintenance to ensure that all components are working properly and safely.

Consider only pools that have filter intake pipes with drain covers. Never use the pool if the drain cover is broken or missing.

Have a qualified pool professional inspect the drain cover on your pool to prevent body and hair entrapment.

Contact your local municipality to ensure that you meet all relevant bylaws before installing and filling a pool. In many municipalities, inflatable pools are covered by the same bylaws as in-ground and above-ground pools.

The Canadian Institute for Health Information notes that for every toddler who drowned in 2002-2003, six to 10 others suffered near-drownings that required hospitalization. A quarter of those children suffered some form of permanent brain damage.

Figures gathered by the Red Cross show that since 1991, only four per cent of reported toddler drownings were in pools with self-closing and self-latching gates. With Environment Canada forecasting a warmer than usual summer for 2006, sales of inflatable pools are expected to remain strong. The Red Cross is advising parents to know the risks so they can take the necessary steps to reduce the risk of accidental drowning.

So, let's define, what was the most valuable conclusion of this review: Are inflatable play structures really safe for our children? L. Corominas 1 Paediatric Orthopaedic Department, Hospital Universitari Son Espases, Palma de Majorca, Spain A. at What Are The Odds Of Games Causing A Blowup in Canada?