Are Trampoline Parks Safe? 3-Year-Old Dies After Inflated Apparatus Bursts

A three-year-old girl died after an inflatable trampoline burst on a beach in Gorleston Sea in Norfolk, England, on Sunday, sending her 20 feet into the air.

Police confirmed that the girl was fatally injured when the licensed inflatable trampoline exploded. The girl who suffered cardiac arrest was given CPR immediately at the scene but she did not survive.

Curt Johnson, the owner of Bounce About play area, said the trampoline burst due to heat and this was his firm’s first major accident.

“The witnesses report a loud bang before the incident but we don’t know at this stage what caused the trampoline to apparently burst, and that’s the purpose of the investigation that we will be undertaking over the next day or so," Superintendent Roger Wiltshire said.

The owner of East Anglia inflatables business said the Bounce About play area was operating on the beach since ten years and children are always supervised.

"I'd estimate 20,000 inflatables have been hired out this weekend. This is vanishingly rare. And they're shipped off to Spain, to Argentina - this wasn't the heat,” he added.

In a similar case, a 46-year-old Victoria man died after doing acrobatic maneuvers at Extreme Air Trampoline Park in Richmond, Canada, in January this year. He suffered a cardiac arrest after falling off the trampoline.

“Although our team [was] supervising, it is impossible to prevent any accident that happens in such an instantaneous manner that is not a result of equipment failure, even with a one-to-one staff to customer ratio,” Extreme Air Park team member Austin Dremeneau said, Global News reported.

A woman whose daughter was injured in a foam pit at a trampoline park in Victoria, Canada, in April 2017, said, “You don't need to have professional experience working at these places. Or even to own a place like this.”

"I just hope that this is going to push the municipal and the federal bodies to start to regulate these places, because they are very dangerous,” she added, CBC News reported.

The number of trampoline park injuries has been on a rise in the recent past and doctors feel that the parks are not safe.

Dr. Emily Newhouse, medical health officer with Vancouver Coastal Health (VCH) said, “We’ve seen reports from our colleagues, both in our health authority, also around the province, that they’re seeing a significant number of injuries come out of trampoline parks.”

Urban Air, a Texas-based company that owns 85 trampoline parks, has an injury rate of three per 1,000 visits, Forbes reported. “You can’t remove 100% of the probability of an injury,” Urban Air CEO Michael Browning said, claiming that the injury rate is very low.

The health services data from Alberta, Canada, revealed that 8,001 trampoline-related visits to emergency departments and urgent-care centers were made by Albertans between April 1, 2014 and March 31, 2017.

“One of the biggest issues I have with trampoline parks is that the people that are going there don’t necessarily have the knowledge and skills to use them safely,” Kathy Belton, associate director of the University of Alberta’s Injury Prevention Centre said. “The foam pits and stuff like that are just a recipe for disaster if you have more than one person in them and if the person is not using them correctly."