10-year-old schoolgirl suffers head injury after diving into pool in Yamagata
YAMAGATA —
A 10-year-old schoolgirl was taken to hospital on Wednesday afternoon after she suffered a head injury as a result of diving into a school pool. A hospital spokesperson said the girl underwent an operation Thursday morning.
According to police, the girl dived into the pool around 1:45p.m. and apparently hit her head on the bottom. When she didn’t surface, a teacher jumped in, pulled her out and administered mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but she failed to regain consciousness.
Police said the pool was 90 cm deep and the girl dived from a 25 cm-high diving block as part of practice for a swimming competition which was scheduled to be held by the local city council on Thursday. The competition has been canceled following the incident.
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Hughgarse
come again?? they made her jump into a pool that is under a meter deep?? sounds like a case of professional negligence...
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timorborder
What about supervision from teachers? I don't have a PhD in math, however, even I know that these numbers don't add up. Seems like a clear case of negligence.
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NuckinFutz
As a certified aquatic facility operator in the USA I can say that a 90cm deep pool with a 25cm high diving platform is ILLEGAL. No construction company in their right mind would build something like that nor would a building permit even be iussued! Doesn't anyone in this country have the least bit of common sense when it comes to safety?
The professional negligence here starts with the architect, then the builder, than the school board, and then the teachers. I hope my children are smart enough to tell a teacher to piss off if they're ever told to do something stupid like this poor girl was! I can only imagine what the family must be going through and my heart goes out to them!
SEVERE legal proceedings need to be brought against the school district! If nobody is held accountable they'll just bow and do it again!
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serindipity
Diving practice into a pool less than a meter deep. The challenge was diving without actually hitting one's head on the bottom. That's just a disaster waiting to happen and, low and behold, it did! At least she isn't in a wheel chair for the rest of her life. I guess the gods were not in their favor today.
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Zybster
But we wanted it to be a safety pool! If the water is too deep the children may sink!
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thepro
What the hell kind of school does diving practice into a 90cm deep pool??
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moonbeams
90cm.. this has to be a typo, I can't imagine a 90cm deep pool.
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amannin1
i don't see why they were even making a 10yr old shallow-water dive to begin with. kids at that age should be doing cannon balls and learning to doggie paddle, or swim underwater.
and with only 90cm, are they RETARDED?!
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moonbeams
i just did a search for the news in japanese. The depth of the water is between 90—110cm. I don't know what that means, could they not get an exact measurement. According to the article, in the same town a 7 year old girl had a similar accident at her school's pool. The depth of the pool was between 85−105cm.
whoever decided to put diving platforms at these pools is an idiot.
here is the pool and the platform she dived from: http://yamagata-np.jp/news/200807/24/img_2008072400255.jpg
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cleo
Very few children seem to actually learn to swim in those shallow pools. What's the incentive, if you can just stand up any time you get fed up of swimming?
And no one should be diving into 90 cm of water, unless they're getting paid to do it in a circus.
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moonbeams
these accidents were 3.5 hours apart
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Zen_Builder
90~110cm means there is a shallow end and a deeper one. Standard feature on the majority of pools in the world.
Looks like a standard school-pool in Japans primary schools.
Not sure what happened but I guess she was supposed to train the podium start for the race. i.e. not doing a straight down head-dive as you would take from a jumping board(1m, 3m, etc).
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timorborder
Learning to swim at Japanese schools is certainly a joke. Actually, with all this trouble down in Oita Prefecture, it was interesting when they opened up the testing program for new teachers. Guess how far teachers have to swim to pass the swimming component of the teacher's examination: 25 meters. That is one lap of those dinky little (shallow) pools that schools have within their grounds. What a joke. How can somebody barely capable of swimming themselves be expected to teach children about confidence in and around water? I think this goes a long way to explaining the number of fatal water accidents that happen every year in Japan.
This country really needs to get with the program when it comes to water safety.
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kinniku
I had a look at the picture. That is not a 'diving platform', it is a starting block.
Much like this one:
http://www.age-group-swimming.org/images/starting-block.JPG
This is a bad accident. Obviously, the child should obviously not have dived into the pool. As Zen Builder mentions above, the girl was probably just training to start for races and dove straight down.
Hopefully, she will regain consciousness and be okay.
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thepro
Regardless, those pools are too shallow and, as someone pointed out, useless for learning to swim.
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dennis0bauer
shallow is good for learning to swim but not for learning to dive you mean
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kinniku
thepro,
How is 90cm to shallow for learning to swim, especially considering the children learning can't swim to begin with? Do you think they should be learning to swim in three meter deep pools?
This accident doesn't seem to have much to do with learning to swim. A girl seems to have dived into a shallow area that was not deep enough for a straight dive.
Unfortunately, this kind of accident is not uncommon in Japan. Perhaps the method that is used to teach children how to start in a race is lacking. However, to say children should not learn how to swim in a shallow pool is overstretching things. They should not be diving straight into shallow areas.
Again, I hope the girl will regain consciousness and will recover.
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mindovermatter
10-year-old schoolgirl suffers head injury after diving into pool in Yamagata
Oh, my god....that's terrible.... I hope she's ok....
Unbelievable.... who's running these schools....? 12 year olds...? The same people that make these stupid "2 people riding on bicycle" laws....?
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Patrick Smash
I think we all learn to swim in shallow water. Even we Irish don't attempt to teach children to swim in deep pools first off. But these pools here all have that design where there is a starting block for diving in from, but obviously 90cms of water is not enough.
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kinniku
Patrick,
True. In addition, one problem with many older pools in Japan is that the floors of the pools tend to be dark which makes it difficult to tell just how deep the water is. In this case the pool seems to have been painted blue, however.
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Patrick Smash
Yes, they do paint them don't they. That's not a good idea, but most of them do mark the depth. The kids should be told no diving, but maybe they were. People are criticizing the teachers here, but at least in this case someone was watching and jumped in. Let's hope this girl recovers.
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cleo
Well, my kids learned to swim in 90 cm of water. They were less than 95cm tall at the time though, so I don't think they thought it was particularly shallow.
I learned in the typical UK pool, waist-deep at one end and 6 ft at the other. It was very uncool to stay in the 'baby' end, and we were only ever allowed to dive into the deep end.
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presto345
I learned to swim in a public pool several decades ago. The shallow ends of the pool, from 40 to 200 cm, had clear markings: "Diving Prohibited". The deeper pool, from 200 to 400 cm, had two diving boards, a lower and a higher one.
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serindipity
Yeah, I've been in a few public pools and they are very strict about diving. The lifeguards nearly blue me out of the water with their whistles at one pool. Why was she diving at this pool? She's very lucky to remain quadruped.
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Scrote
I don't think I've ever seen a Japanese pool with a deep end, are they outlawed for safety reasons? It means the pool is always full of guys walking up and down instead of swimming: a deep end would soon put a stop to that.
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harkins
I can’t see a problem with 90cm deep pools. As she was apparently training for a competition to be held on Thursday I assume that she could already swim. And as she’s only 10 years old I guess she isn’t very tall or heavy. If anything, the only concern could be about the level of instruction given for performing shallow entry race dives. But even then, sometimes people make mistakes, which she might have done. If Japan has to stop podium diving for youngsters or stop using shallow pools, they’ll need more than state of the art Speedo swimming suits to be competitive in international competition in the future.
But, I hope she makes a speedy recovery and gets back in the water soon.
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delitachan
Oh please, at least you all HAD a swimming pool in your all's schools.
It seems like that girl may suffer paralysis. I've heard of lots of incidents like these and the end result is almost always the victim being paralyzed due to trauma.
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KitsuneYoukai
It says here she failed to regain consciousness. Thsi doesn't sound right, normally that means death or headin to brain death. The reporting seems a little off. Anyway poor girl, however, this made it to national news. Things like this happen more often than people think, kids getting such injuries but it is never reported like this only in local news.
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rranta
I learned to get my face wet in about 3 feet of water. Then, over to the mid to deep end for the swimming lessons. I really hope she is ok. This is a terrible experience for a kid to go through. It should have been prevented.
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azminivanracer
she wasnt "learning to swim" she had a mishap during practice for a swimming competition. if any of you have even seen a swim competition, you would know that they dive off these little 1 foot blocks into a pool where they race to the other end and back ect. depending how many meters the race is. 134cm is standard depth for that kind of a pool, so i think either the police or the journalist needs to get the facts straight...unless this ten year old COMPETITION swimmer, who obviously has been doing this long enough to compete, really purposely dove head first into 2 feet of water like the article says.
the diving block was 25 cm high...thats less than a foot people. that is way too short of a block, and the pool wouldnt be 90cm deep. thats 2 feet of water. the average kiddy pool is 3 feet. i refuse to believe the facts of this story are true.
however, my heart does go out to the girl. the only fact here is that she really did get hurt. i hope for the best.
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