While we were talking about the preparation of the contents for an upcoming CONICA webinar on safety flooring for playgrounds that we will announce soon to our installers or potential customers in Latin America, my colleague and Sales Manager for this market mentioned the positive historical evolution of safety in playgrounds.
The usual playground from my childhood with a few swings and slides donated by the marketing campaign of a chocolate company came to mind. Over the years, the metals of the tubes and seats were totally rusted, the chains continually pinched your hands and arms. Some metal on the slides tore your clothes apart with their cutting edges that had separated. The worn ground under the swings and slides left the rocks visible to the surface, sand had gone during the latest heavy rain. I have never needed to get tattoos. My knees, arms and other parts of my body were tattooed with wounds or covered in red mercury-chrome disinfectant, also prohibited today for health and safety reasons.
My case seems to have been repeated in most of my generation in my country and miraculously we managed to survive.
Today I would not accept, under any circumstances, taking my children or grandchildren to play in a playground with these dangers. Risk is necessary for the children’s learning process, but within an order.
These safety issues did not occur only in our playground business. If I tell you about my school transport, it consisted of my father driving his Vespa motorcycle with my two younger brothers, standing on the platform holding the center of the handlebars and me in the back of the driver’s seat, trying to avoid falling, wrapping around my father’s waist, a difficult task because he weighed more than 100 kg. That’s a total of four people on a Vespa motorcycle.
With this in mind, it is not surprising that in Catalonia we have so many good riders in all categories of the World Motorcycle Championship.
The same thing happened in occupational safety, with extremely high accident rates, but I suspect that I am already behaving like an old man telling long stories. I must stop.
Fortunately, safety in general and playground safety in particular has evolved very positively in the last 20 years.
International play equipment safety standards allow equipment to be designed without any risk of entrapment, with chemically safe and structurally stable materials, maximum free fall heights have been limited and safety surfaces reduce the probability of critical accidents due to fall in height.
The training of playground installers, maintainers and inspectors has allowed great advances, Critical Fall Height measuring heads and devices are today much better, they maintain better measurement reproducibility between calibrations and the different laboratories contrast their measurements among themselves on reference surfaces. in periodic “round-robin” events, with which the level of confidence and the dispersion in the measurements is much better.
My biggest concern is that maintenance budgets for playground areas are often too low. Some managers only think about the initial cost and do not consider the importance of a regular good maintenance.
I often see playgrounds with safety flooring based on sand or other loose materials where the material has displaced with use, and there are dangerous areas because they do not act frequently enough to rake and ensure the thickness in the fall areas or clean them from undesired objects.
Synthetic solutions require less maintenance, but fall height tests should also be done at regular inspections to ensure that they have not lost their initial damping capacity.
And finally, I know that a playground is an area with mainly play equipment, but do not forget to allocate budget for the flooring that is an integral part of the playground safety.
We have come a long way, in a very positive sense, but there is still a good way to go.
My colleague responsible for Latin America said also a quote that I fully agree upon:
We like to see children play on our surfaces, but please do not play with the safety of playgrounds.
Take care of yourselves and our little ones.
Rubberman Blog 