There was a true and very tragic incident similar to this in Melbourne three or so years ago. A infant, about four year old, was sat on the filter cover on the edge of the parent’s swimming pool. Unbeknown to the parents, the top had cracked and the force of vacuum from the circulation pump disembowelled infant via the backpassage. The infacnt dies shortly after in hospital.
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Cecil’s column can be found on-line at this link:
Did a vacuum-flush commode once suck a woman’s insides out? (03-Jan-1992)
The column (including Slug Signorino’s illustration) can also be found on pages 260-262 of Cecil Adams’ book «Triumph of the Straight Dope».
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bmorey, you probably realize that this message board is full of skeptics who would be interested in hearing of a news source that could confirm this gruesome story.
Let me add that this is one of the more “willies-inducing” Straight Dope columns.
It doesn’t make for pleasant reading, but there was a similar accident in Raleigh, North Carolina a few years back. It that case the girl survived but was severly injured, and her parents eventually won a multi-million dollar lawsuit.
I found a 1996 article about the incident, Sunction Entrapment, from the Raleigh News and Observer, which at that time reported that “the drain-cover maker revealed that it knew of at least 13 similar accidents nationwide”.
Yikes!
And she joined the school swim team? I would have developed a pathological fear of anything having to do with swimming pools!
Well, I was fascinated by bmorey’s Melbourne story, so I’ve been sitting here, puttering around on the Web, but so far I haven’t been able to find anything on that incident specifically.
What I did find were numerous pool and spa safety websites that stress the need for special drain covers and automatic cutoffs on pool and spa suction drains.
The danger, however, seems to be not that the toddler sits down on the drain and has his guts sucked out, but rather that the force of the suction pulls him underwater, holds him there, and drowns him.
It’s no urban myth. The following is from an official Government web site –
http://www.fairtrading.wa.gov.au/consumers/product_safety/pools.shtml
Quote:
Death by skimmer box- the hidden back yard killer
Death by disembowelment sounds like a medieval torture. But over the last few years, it’s happened to several Australian children.
The culprit was an innocent-looking moulded skimmer box at the side of a fibreglass swimming pool.
To a small child, your pool’s skimmer box looks like a potty or seat. But if a child sits down on it, the immense suction of the pool’s filter pump forms an instant seal between your child’s bottom and the edge of the skimmer box resulting in horrific, and sometimes fatal, injuries. Injuries which are inflicted in a few seconds and are often permanent. (end quote)
I couldn’t find a report on the Victorian incident, but this is good proof vacuum disembowelment is no urban myth.
Sorry, Bmorey, I really didn’t mean to step on your toes there, if I seemed to be implying that toddler vacuum disembowelment via pool skimmer WAS an urban myth. I was just saying that I’d be happier if I could see an actual news account of it, rather than a government advisory, which seems to be rather anecdotal. Governments advise us on many things that may or may not be true; it’s the “CYA syndrome”, which if you don’t have it Down Under, stands for “Cover Your Ass”. The government thinks, “We’d better warn people, because it might turn out to be true, and someone else would get hurt, and then our phony-baloney jobs would be endangered.” Every Halloween we get official warnings in my area about pins and needles or poison in trick or treat candy, which is something that hasn’t actually happened in about 20 years, I think, but the wheels of government continue to crank out the warnings.
I tend to be very skeptical about this sort of thing until I get the Straight Dope. Our last case of “pins in the candy” turned out to be a deeply neurotic 20-something guy who put them in his own M & Ms, to get attention.
Also, I’m not sure what a “skimmer box” is. The pool safety websites I was looking at were all talking about the drain in the side or bottom of a pool or side, that’s pulling the bad water out.
From the Center for Disease Control’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports May 15, 1992 vol 41(19): 333-335 Suction-Drain Injury in a Public Wading Pool – North Carolina, 1991
A 3 three-old girl sits on a wading pool drain and gets eviscerated. The rectum was manually pushed back but damage was already done to the intestinal layers which subsequently died. She lived but ended up with a colostomy. Note that the MMWR mentions “previous reports of abdominal injuries” and cites a published report on them (“Rectosigmoid perforation and intestinal evisceration from transanal suction”}.
Yikes!
Okay, the suction disemboweling is certainly relevant, but misses the point of the column. It was not talking about pool cleaners, or pool suction for the filtration system, etc. It was talking about toilets.