Public playground safety: paradigm or paradox.

Public playground safety was the number on requested topic for information according to the 1992-93 National Recreation and Parks Association annual report. Why is this? Is the subject new? Is there a shortage of information on the topic? Hardly. There is more written information on the subject from the last ten years than anyone has time to read. This fact alone might be the driving force behind the sudden increase in member requests for playground safety information. Members are looking for answers to their problems, not more questions that need answers.

Since 1989, NRPA has dedicated itself to providing answers to all your public playground safety questions. Thanks to the efforts of the National Playground Safety Institute (NPSI), most of your playground safety questions have been answered. In spite of the abundance of information on playground safety, NRPA members continue to search for instant wisdom to deal with all their playground problems. Since each and every playground is a unique environment, there is no simple cure for your public playground ills.

Where do you begin? How do you begin to ensure your playgrounds comply with the 1991 U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission Public Playground Safety Guidelines and the just-released American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) voluntary industry Standard F1487? I would suggest that calling the National Recreation and Park Association is a good first step. NRPA has a few products available that will provide the basis for establishing such a program. One publication, Playground Safety is No Accident, provides a comprehensive outline for the playground manager, complete with sample inspection and audit forms, procedures, rationale, staff training outlines, understanding quizzes and much more. NRPA also publishes Play It Safe, an Anthology of Playground Safety, that is a compendium of monographs prepared for the 1992 National Playground Safety Institute and Points on Playgrounds, a workbook of supplemental information to the Play It Safe anthology. NRPA also has entrapment probes and protrusion gauges to help you identify playground hazards.

Regardless of all equipment and material available, the key to success in risk reduction and control is designing a unique program specific to each agency that is based on a common sense approach to a complex issue. Consider the following major factors when designing your program:

Have a Plan of Action. Most public playgrounds will not be in compliance with the 1991 CPSC guidelines, let alone the 1993 ASTM standard, so how can a city, school district or pack district bring all their playgrounds into compliance when financial resources are so scarce? You can't all at once! However, this is no excuse for doing nothing. You must begin to convince the policy-and decision-makers that financial resources need to be allocated to improve public playgrounds.

Develop Action Plan

You can do this by systematically identifying problem areas, determining priorities, assigning dollars to those priorities, and developing a reasonable plan of action. You can use the plan as a defense against alleged legal wrong-doing, if the agency can demonstrate that it took a reasonable approach to developing and implementing its plan.

Address Known Problems. Don't get bogged down wondering where to start. Address the known problems immediately. Even if your agency hasn't conducted a comprehensive playground audit or established a formalized inspection program, park and recreation professionals know the major problem areas. Here are some of the initial actions you can make without much delay or major capital investment. Remember, good maintenance procedures go a long way in reducing losses. * Seventy percent of all playground injuries are caused by falls. Replace hard surfacing with appropriate impact-attenuating surfacing. * Cover over, pad or remove exposed concrete footings. Fix, dispose of or remove broken equipment. * Remove broken glass and other debris from the playground area. * Replace worn swing chains and connectors. * Remove equipment not recommended for public playgrounds according to the new CPSC Guidelines, such as heavy flying animal swings, multiple occupancy swings (excluding tire swings), rope swings, swinging exercise rings and trapeze bars. * Remove equipment that is known to have caused a reported injury because of poor maintenance, lack of repairs, or poor design that is not in compliance with the CPSC guidelines or ASTM standard. If you haven't corrected the causes of these injuries, you should, or remove the specific piece of equipment.

Prevent Losses. Be proactive and concentrate efforts on actions that will prevent accidents. Improve inspection and maintenance procedures and staff training techniques. Often agencies are so concerned with how to defend themselves in court that they lose sight of the best defense of all - stopping the accident from occurring in the first place. Often, government agencies don't have enough money do to it right the first time, but somehow find the funds when the job needs to be redone.

Implement Proactive Programs. Hire good people and pay them according to the responsibility they have. Provide them with timely, on-going training that they need to do their jobs well. Test their knowledge and skill. Failure to provide adequate training is cause for legal action. Conduct playground inspections on a consistent basis, and have each agency establish its own basis for the frequency of the inspection. Equip the inspector with the tools and supplies necessary to make immediate repairs and develop a written work order and follow-through system to take care of more complicated problems. Purchase playground equipment from reputable manufacturers and require, in writing, that the equipment comply with the most current safety guidelines or standards. Avoid homemade equipment. Repair and retrofit equipment only with parts provided by the manufacturer. Begin a comprehensive community education program. Implementing these programs will naturally provide the best defense against a claim or lawsuit.

Document All Activities. Unfortunately, there have been numerous occasions in which public agencies have failed to document their actions. If no documentation, and/or incomplete documentation exists, it becomes very difficult to be proactive in mitigating damages after an accident or injury has occurred. Now that CPSC has updated its playground safety guidelines and ASTM has released its standard, it becomes imperative that public agencies document their actions regarding public playground safety.

Documentation serves several purposes. It helps communicate the program to all people within the organization and to the public. It creates a paper trail of the agency's plan of action for reducing playground hazards. It helps to ensure consistent implementation of the plan and it demonstrates that the agency is acting to meet its legal duty to provide safe playgrounds for public use. Presenting careful and thorough documentation may become an agency's primary defense against a claim or lawsuit allegin negligence. Without written documentation there is no factual information on which to base motions for dismissal or summary judgment on behalf of the agency. Your defense becomes a situation of your word against theirs, and many times this leads to costly settlements.

Our agency has developed a detailed public playground safety and maintenance program. This program was written in 1989 and expanded and refined in 1991. It is now available to everyone through the NRPA and NPSI publication, Playground Safety is No Accident. All proceeds go to benefit NRPA and NPSI programs. The basis for this article comes from experiences during the first five years of developing our agency's program. Since the beginning of our program development, we have experienced many successes and milestones. Developing and implementing a playground safety and maintenance program is not a small task. Establishing your program will take the commitment and involvement of many people over a long period of time.

A Life of Its Own 

An important point is that your program and plan is never finished. The plan will take on a life of its own well beyond the employment of the agency's current staff and it will need to be revised from time to time as your priorities change.

Playgrounds are just one of many public facilities that we manage. I know first-hand how little time everyone has for special projects like analyzing and revising current playground operations, procedures and policies. Don't get discouraged when the personal realization hits as to just how large an undertaking you have started. Each long journey begins with a first step and yours should be to identify and inventory what you have and develop a list of what needs to be done to get and keep your public playgrounds in good order. Then you must put this list in order of importance to establish a priority for your very limited resources.

My first step began in late 1988, after joining the ASTM subcommittee developing the public playground safety standard. It was during my first few meetings that I truly began to understand the importance of playgrounds to a child's development and the causes of most serious playground accidents.

During my first year of ASTM involvement, I began to get phone calls from my peers on many playground safety issues. I even knew the answers. Then it hit me. I was giving what I felt was good advice, yet I wasn't practicing what I was preaching in my own community. From that day on I decided that the Wheaton Park District wasn't going to experience a serious playground accident because of not trying to improve the overall safety of our play environments.

During the spring of 1989, I assigned the task of organizing our playground files and information to a park operations student intern. This intern knew nothing about playgrounds when he started, but I guarantee when he was done he knew more about 24 public playgrounds than anyone in our agency. It took weeks just to gather all the information on our playgrounds. Important information on our playgrounds was found at different locations throughout the agency. This task led to the development of a comprehensive checklist of information (site history checklist). These documents make up the history of every playground and should be maintained at one location indefinitely.

Many of our sites did not have site plans or a list of existing equipment, so we took black-and-white photos to document the status of our existing playgrounds. We labeled and photocopied these photos, and gave them to all staff involved in our playground safety program for future reference.

The biggest task for our student intern was the in-depth evaluation of each site for compliance to the 1981 U.S. CPSC playground safety guidelines. We utilized an audit form developed by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health for their Statewide Comprehensive Injury Prevention Program. The intern and I reviewed many playground safety documents as part of his playground safety training before beginning the audit process. We then went out in the field as a team and completed two site audits. This task took approximately two hours for each playground, not including office time to summarize the audit findings. The intern then continued with the remaining audits on his own while reviewing each completed audit with me. The summaries from all 24 audits gave us the first detailed look at the current state of our playgrounds.

What Will the Initial Audit Reveal? If your playgrounds are anything like ours, you will find many of the same safety concerns. Most of our sites were constructed during the 1970s and are composed of mostly wood composite play structures. We observed a lot of checking and splintering on many of the wood structures that required maintenance. The structural integrity of the many more-than-15-year old, in-ground, wooden uprights was our major concern. It was apparent to me that many of these play structures had reached the end of their lives.

Other significant findings were the lack of proper guardrails and protective barriers, protruding hardware, many head entrapment openings between three-and-one-half and nine inches, swings attached to composite play structures, three or more swings per bay, slides without proper side rails, transition platforms or bottom runouts and last, but not least, tire swings too close to their support posts.

In spite of all these shortcomings, the areas we determined to be the most important to improving the safety of our playgrounds were related to surfacing and equipment layout issues. In fact, one complete playground was removed for these reasons. Most of our sites have sand as its safety surfacing material; however, the depth was not sufficient for the equipment's critical fall height. Second, the equipment was so high that we could not provide a surface that would meet the ASTM surfacing standard and the U.S. CPSC surfacing guidelines. Last, the spacing between equipment and from the equipment to the perimeter edging did not meet the CPSC guidelines. After thorough evaluation and discussion by our playground safety team, which was formed as a direct result of this process, we decided that we should focus our efforts and resources on improving our surfacing and spacing requirements.

If 70 percent of all playground injuries are related to falls, it was logical that we proceed in this fashion. We revised playground borders and added more surfacing material by mid-1990. This task was done with in-house personnel for a supply cost of $20,000. The playground safety team is composed of staff from every level of park personnel that has anything to do with design, installation, maintenance, repair or inspection of our playground areas.

Changes Recommended

The playground safety team also recommended some of the first changes to our current playground maintenance procedures. These recommendations included an increase in the frequency of safety inspections based on factors affecting each individual site. We provided additional training for staff responsible for inspections, including supervisors and park planning staff. Maintenance staff is now required to rototill the sand playground surface, since it was pointed out through our inspection program that the sand was always compacted or kicked in wear areas under swings and slides. Today almost every change to our program guidelines and maintenance procedures come directly from the team.

During 1989, while we were just beginning to take action on the seemingly never-ending list of concerns, I began the administrative task of putting our team's findings and recommended policies and procedures into a written plan. This plan became the Wheaton Park Districts Comprehensive Public Playground Safety Program. (This document was revised in 1992 and became Playground Safety Is No Accident).

In 1990, our team developed some recommendations for playground equipment bid specifications. We have a long way to go before we are satisfied with our bid specifications. We also developed and installed playground user education and regulation signs for all our sites. The most significant aspect of the signs is that it they include our name and phone number so that the users can call if they have any questions or notice anything that they think might need some attention.

This same year we attempted our first playground replacement schedule. We based the schedule on three degrees of need - high, moderate and low, and three areas of concern in the following order of importance - surfacing, play area layout and equipment compliance to industry safety guidelines. These program accomplishments led to our governing board's annual commitment of $100,000 to the on-going replacement of our playgrounds. The team evaluates this replacement schedule annually to make sure it takes into account any factors that could alter the original replacement plan.

The year 1991 marked the need to review and revise our written playground safety program due to the fact that the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission released their revised guidelines for public playground safety. Staff revised our audit form to reflect the CPSC changes and our team completed the revised audit form process for all playground sites. This process created a new expanded list of safety concerns. The new audit form process also helped us develop a more objective method for establishing our playground replacement schedule.

While the majority of our team's effort was centered on the audit process and updating our areas of concern, we did not stop making many of the recommended repairs. Team members and staff responsible for maintenance, repairs and safety inspections were busy replacing swing seats, tire swing seats and backhoe diggers that did not comply with CPSC guidelines or were not holding up to our normal use. These tasks may seem rather insignificant, however, the outcome resulted in savings through reduced repairs and maintenance costs.

These audit findings led to the development of some new playground design criteria that eliminated repeating the same old problems over and over. We recommend that no playground decks be higher than six feet for school age children, and four feet for preschool children, even though it is not addressed in either CPSC or ASTM. Swings will be located at the edge of the playground or in a separate area. Swing sets shall not be higher than ten feet. Whenever possible, preschool equipment shall be located in its own area. All new playgrounds will include sub-surface drainage as an integral part of design.

Program Matures

In 1992, we continued to focus our efforts on many of the concerns identified in the revised audit process, especially those that could be corrected with limited expense and/or the modification of maintenance procedures. We replaced all S-hooks and installed new ones according to manufacturers' guidelines. We replaced all barrier walls that did not comply with CPSC guidelines. Staff also began installing mats or pads under high-use wear areas, such as swings and slides.

Our program has matured with age. We are well into our playground replacement schedule and have even begun replacing specific pieces of equipment that scored poorly on our last safety audit. 1993 was very similar to 1992. We continue to look for ways to improve our playgrounds and constantly review and evaluate our more recent equipment. We have experimented with various wood fiber mulch surfaces, including two rubber mat surfaces. We have made every attempt to include accessibility and integrated play into all our new playgrounds. The results of our efforts will be judged over time by both our users and the team. We may have made mistakes over the past five years, but at least we have made a good faith effort to improve the safety and quality of our public playgrounds.

I challenge all agencies to provide safe, yet challenging play environments for children. Your agency can gain greater, more productive use of its assets and tax dollars by implementing many of these suggestions. Who knows, maybe your increased awareness and concern for public safety might lead to additional public support and funding for your agency's other park improvement initiatives.

The most important piece of advice I can give you is: don't sit back and wait for someone else to hand you a program that will meet your needs. Only you have the answers to your specific problems. Don't be afraid of making a mistake. It is time for action on your part. There are a number of old sayings I could use to get you psyched up to get out of your chair and take the first step to improving your playgrounds. Since I am a parkie first and foremost, I will close with, "It's time to stop tinkering with the lawn mower and get out there and mow the grass." Good luck.