A new study from the University of Georgia has discovered that bounce houses are more dangerous than many parents realize.
The study’s lead author John Knox, a geography professor at Franklin Arts and Sciences at the University of Georgia, found that 132 worldwide, wind-related bounce house incidents between January 2000 and December 2021 have caused at least 479 injuries and at least 28 deaths.
Knox spoke on WDUN’s Newsroom and said even a slight breeze in favorable weather conditions could be strong enough to topple a bounce house.
“Winds, somewhere around 25 miles an hour and up, that's the regulation that says that you shouldn't be using a bounce house,” Knox said. “You probably should get out of it and deflate it. But we also found cases where it seems the winds were lighter than that.”
However, this 25mph regulation only applies to a few states, such as Maryland.
Bounce houses are often under-regulated as well. According to his study, 17 states either have no guidelines or specifically exclude inflatables from regulation. Knox and researchers discovered that 22 states have explicitly included inflatables in regulations and have specific wind safety criteria.
Of these 22 states, 19 of them follow the American Society for Testing and Materials’ standards. These standards rule that commercial bounce houses must be supervised by a trained operator. The operator must also be specifically trained to assess wind speed by using the Beaufort Scale.
“The Beaufort Scale was invented to estimate wind speed based on the condition of spray from the ocean, and it was extended to trees and branches and so forth,” Knox explained. “You wouldn't have thought that you'd have to have that much weather knowledge.”
Southwestern states are particularly vulnerable to sudden wind-related events, called dust devils. Knox’s study found that these unpredictable dust devils caused at least 12 percent of bounce house incidents.
Although cases of lofted bounce houses get the most media attention, Knox said that just as many injuries are associated with simply jumping inside inflatables.
“I have seen statistics that show that bounce houses lead to about the same kind of frequency of injuries [as trampolines], especially with pediatric things where kids bounce and break something.”
Knox said this should not deter parents from renting a bounce house for their children’s birthday party, but one priority should be on parents’ agendas.
“Pay attention to what the kids are doing,” Knox said. “Make sure that nobody has to go to the ER because they bounced out of an overfull house or something like that. And pay attention to the weather, check the forecast but also monitor the current weather conditions. Because as our study shows, you can have winds that will blow a bounce house over on a good day.”
You can listen to the full interview by clicking the link above.
