Inflatable Accidents and Injuries: Reports and Causes

In September of 2005 the US Consumer Product Safety Commission published their 2005 update of Amusement Ride-Related Injuries and Deaths in the United States (to see the report in PDF format, click Here). The report found that that in 2004 inflatable rides, such as inflatables slides and bouncers, accounted for an estimated 4,900 non-occupational injuries treated in hospital emergency rooms. Compare this to mechanical mobile amusement rides which had only 2,500 injuries. The table to the right shows the US CPSC estimates of inflatable amusement ride injuries per year

The web site www.rideaccidents.com tracks all news stories of accidents and injuries involving amusement rides, with a specific category on inflatable rides.

Causes of Accidents

At Safety Air Systems, we spend a great deal of time examining reports of accidents and injuries on inflatable rides. We look beyond the news stories, and talk with manufacturers and operators, and examine lawsuits that are brought against operators and manufacturers. In sifting through all of this information, we are able to identify some obvious patterns. Almost all significant injuries on inflatables fell into one of three categories:

• Lack of Trained Supervision
  This category actually encompasses some of those below as well, and is without doubt the number one cause of injuries. Being "trained" to supervise an inflatable ride in operation often requires nothing more than reading the manufacturer's warnings that are posted on the inflatable itself (note that this is not sufficient training for setting up and taking down an inflatable).

  Every rental company will tell you that they supervise their events and follow the manufacturer's posted rules (except those that just drop off the inflatable). Many of them do -- but evidence of thousands of emergency room visits each year from unsupervised inflatables proves that not enough companies supervise events and follow the posted rules.

• Overloaded Inflatables
  The most serious inflatable-related injuries tend to come from the larger inflatable slides, and in almost every case the inflatable was overloaded with more than the manufacturer's maximum occupants. Just look at many of the slide-related headlines, they often read something like "9 Injured When Inflatable Slide Collapses." There are no inflatable slides that allow nine occupants at once! Reading through the actual news story almost always verifies that there were far too many people on the inflatable.

• Not Tethered Properly
  The most shocking and terribly news stories about inflatables are when bouncers full of children are actually picked up in a gust of wind and sent sailing through the air, or even out to sea. You can see this hazard in action in the video Jolly Jumpers Gone Wild in which five bouncers from a car dealership go sailing over and onto a freeway.

  In addition to the very serious but rare danger of airborne bouncers, lack of tethering is one of the main causes of inflatable slide injuries (usually combined with overloading).

• Sudden Deflation
  Rapid deflation of an inflatable is almost always caused by some kind of power failure to the blower. Inflatables are designed to retain their inflation even with numerous small punctures and tears. But if a circuit blows, or someone trips over a power cord, or turns off the blower as a prank (a surprisingly common occurance in the cases we've studied), the inflatable will deflate relatively rapidly.

  This deflation leads to great instability of the inflatable. Deflation is one of the common causes of slide "collapse." Even if a large slide is properly tethered, partial deflation can cause it to fall over, spilling the occupants.

Manufacturing Flaws

In our investigation of hundreds of newspaper articles and lawsuits dealing with inflatable ride injuries, we were unable to find a single instance of manufacturing error that was responsible for a significant injuries. Some minor injuries were indirectly caused by bouncers without finger-safe netting, or without steps leading to the entrance.