Calling shenanigans on this, lest you have a cite. “Illegal”, eh?
The pond in our town had a high dive that was exactly 463 feet above the water, and you had to swim out to the platform it was on, then climb a ladder with intentionally loosened rungs while the raft was rocking, then walk out on to the concave shaped board, and then the water was about 4 feet deep, so when you hit the water, you immediately felt the tendrils of the kid-eating plantlife that grew at the bottom.
And in 7th grade, to complete the swimming portion of PE, you had to dive off. Crystal, my next door neighbor, and incidentally the most perfect body THIS 12 year old had ever seen sunbathe in the yard next door, was the lifeguard, so there was no small measure of young testosterone raging through me when I bravely swam to the platform ahead of everyone else and made my dive.
Which ended up as some sort of bellyflop, nearly killing me, but I was NOT going to let that show to Crystal.
Years later, a couple kids broke their necks there, on that highdive, or more accurately, on the bottom. One died, the other is a quadriplegic. The pond is now a fishing hole, and swimming is prohibited.
No word on Crystal.
Shenanigans is right. Some schools are removing them, but some do indeed still have them.
That depends on what year you were 10. If it was 1974, then you weren’t the only person on the planet to have done that, seeing as how I did exactly that, myself (though I think I was 13 at the time). 
I took diving lessons one summer, but quit when I did a back flip too close to the board (the low one) and banged the back of my head on the underneath side of the board as I came around. Clearly I wasn’t very good at it anyway, so no loss there.
Sorry, I had understood that they were no longer allowed in public CA pools. I was thinking of 10 feet +. At any rate, I haven’t seen one for a very long time.
We have 3 high dives and 3 low dives here at the public pool in Lava Hot Springs, ID. We also have one of the last 10 meter platforms, plus the 5 & 7.5. They all get a lot of use, but yes there are tons of problems.
with the diving boards, rarely, we have one person land on another. we have a lot of belly flops winding divers & causing a rescue to be needed. Mostly we have non-swimming kids having to be rescued. nearly every weekend.
The platforms are another story…yesterday alone we had 3 spinal injury rescues that ultimately required ambulance transport to the hospital. one woman lost consciousness. During the summer, we average 5-7 spinal injury rescues a week.
We haven’t had a death, but a few years ago, a 16 year old belly flopped off the 10 meter, and it stopped his heart. he had to be defibrillated, and ultimately spent time in physical rehab learning to walk & talk again after needing CPR for over 4 minutes.
So, yes they are fun. they are great. they are also dangerous and in many places it has been deemed not worth the risk of injury, death or lawsuit.
at 500 feet you would be falling at a speed of over 100 mph, and would not survive. the highly trained cliff divers don’t exceed 170 feet.
It’s a joke, told from the perspective of someone afraid of heights.
The one where I grew up was 2000 ft and was made from a single strand of spaghetti.
The new swim park in North Scottsdale has 'em.
First I’ve heard of it.
We still have both kinds in Michigan.
I had a teacher who claimed he went off a high board, raised his head (i.e., tilted it backward), hit the water face first and broke his nose.
I (successfully) jumped off a 10-meter platform into a lake once. Even though it was uneventful, I do not recommend jumping off a 10-meter platform because you’re in the air long enough to realize that you’re voluntarily falling almost 4 stories.
Swimming pools?..pah!
Diving boards?..tish!
Platforms?..fipsy!
In my home town we had the welcoming chilly, tea coloured embrace of the the River Tees.
There were several bridges across that provided diving opportunities butthis was the pinnacle.
One year, about 25 years ago the bridge was scaffolded for repair and it provided some unofficial diving platforms at varying heights. (about 100, 150 and 200 feet as I recall).
We climbed the scaffolding and dived in to the deep water channel under the right hand arch.
Either side of that 10 foot channel were rock ledges about 6 feet below the water so you had to be accurate.
I dived from pretty much level with the roadway and…it…took…a…long…time…to…hit…the…water.
Long enough to think through the pros and cons of what I was doing and decide that once would be enough.
Spring boards come in the 3 foot and 6 foot variety then you move to platforms that are 30 feet some having a half platform set between 10 and 20 feet.
Your typical public pool is somewhere around 10 feet deep which was the old standard for the 6 foot springboards, after multiple lawsuits that standard changed. Rather then redoing the pools so they were deeper most towns just removed the 6 foot boards. I think the 3 foot boards have a minimum depth standard of 9 feet.
At this point most public places have just cut out the boards all together for liability reasons.
I managed to hit my head on a 3 foot board when I was 9 or 10. I was doing an inward didn’t spring far enough and came back down on the board. It hurt, I remained conscious with a mild concision. No permanent damage. The pool staff missed it completely.
I think it’s a shame to see the boards going but also understand it’s not worth trying to keep them. Too many have moved to just using them as something to jump off rather then actually learning and using them for diving.
My local pool wouldn’t allow anyone to use the diving boards unless they had passed a test or were a member of one of the diving classes. (The simple answer for many kids was to sign up for a class but never attend, working out to 5 bucks a year for unlimited diving board use.)
When I was growing up, the first time I ever swam in a pool was when I was about 9, it was for a diving class for one of my red cross certs. It was at letchworth State Park, they had a swimming pool, full on olympic size with marked lanes and all, I think it was a uniform 4 feet deep or whatever lap pools are, and a diving specific pool that was something like 20 feet deep, just a smallish square pool[basically enough for the diving safely bit] with a dive tower that had a 1 meter board a 3 meter board and a 10 meter board. i do know we had to accomplish dives at standing on the edge and the 1 meter board - skill at basically solid platform and springboard.
Well, I found a picture of the olympic lap pool at least.
A little google-fu shows that they’ve taken down both the low and high diving boards from the public pool in the neighborhood where I grew up (Troy, NY). Looks like they replaced them with slides.
I can understand why. More than once I jumped or dived off the high board and touched bottom. I can see it being dangerous. I am casual friends with a guy who is wheelchair bound due to spinal damage resulting from slamming into the bottom of a pool after a dive.
Which comes down to you are doing it wrong. Consider if you’re diving correctly off a 10 meter platform you shouldn’t end up going more then 10 feet deep.
I googled the current standards
There’s 8mm family film showing my dad doing about 5 somersaults off a high platform at a busy southern Ontario public swimming pool in the 1950s.
Like everybody else, as a kid, I could dive freely. At the local swimming pool, there was a sort of square, deep pool that was used for training both divers and…err…divers (I mean the kind that jumps and the kind that has air tanks and palms).
Anyway, it was open to all, and you could jump from up to ten meters (although I never dared jumping from the highest platform, only from the one below. No clue how high it was, but I remember it seemed like it was taking forever to get back to the surface). At some point when I was a teen, there has been an accident and they closed the highest platforms (You could still jump from maybe 5 meters). Nowadays, the whole thing is off-limit for the general public.
And at my current local pool, there’s only one plank, maybe…50 cm above the water level…
I knew this one guy who was on the University of Wisconsin’s dive team. He did the most amazing dive. The Triple Lindey… or something like that.
Not surprising, since that’s twice as high as the deck on the Golden Gate Bridge.
Your pic shows a small bridge about 8 feet above a small creek. 