One child was killed and another was injured after a wind gust blew a bounce house into the air at a baseball game in Maryland on Friday night, local officials said.
Local emergency personnel received a call in Waldorf, Maryland, at about 9:21 p.m. Friday from the Regency Furniture Stadium reporting that a moon bounce house became airborne because of a wind gust while children were inside.
At the time, the Southern Maryland Blue Crabs minor league baseball team was playing a game, and “the moon bounce was carried approximately 15 to 20 feet up in the air, causing children to fall before it landed on the playing field,” according to a news release from the Charles County government posted on its website.
A 5-year-old boy from La Plata, Maryland, was flown to Children’s National Hospital in Washington, where he was later pronounced dead, the release said. A second child also was flown out by Maryland State Police with non-life-threatening injuries.
Funny, because we recall products that can kill children all the time, even when there are low death counts, because any lethal scenario that is possible with a child’s toy or child-focused product must be accounted for.
At a minimum, the law must require that these be anchored securely enough not to be blow away. Put it on the companies that rent these out and set them up to do so safely, instead of making any amount of dead children an acceptable cost.
If this happens with any regularity at all, regardless of how rare, there’s no excuse for letting it happen again.
I’m fine with requiring them to be anchored, and you’re right that safety laws are pretty strict for toys, but we can’t mandate literally-zero-risk-of-harm. “Rare” and “regular” are terms I generally think of as opposed and there’s always going to be some cold calculation of “acceptable risk” on a personal and a societal scale.
Playgrounds. Hot dogs. Stairs. Cars (inside, outside, around). Cement. Bicycles.