Swimming pools are a lot of fun, especially when the weather gets hot. It’s good exercise to go swimming, and you might love having pool parties at your home. With summer just around the corner, it’s a good idea to think about liability for your home swimming pool. Who is liable if a child falls in and drowns? What happens if a guest gets hurt?
Pools are known as attractive nuisances. That means that you must take extra care to protect children who could enter your property. Since pools are fun, essentially, you need to make sure no child is around it without supervision.
Here are a few things you can do to reduce your liability. First, make sure your pool has a non-climbable fence around it. For people who have a porch leading to a pool deck, it’s a good idea to have a latching gate and doors leading to the pool area, so children of younger ages are less likely to fall in or enter the pool without supervision.
Another thing you can do is to buy a pool cover. These covers strap down over the water and around the pool’s edges. This creates a kind of platform, so if a child does enter the pool area, he or she falls onto the dry cover instead of into the water.
Texas is hot almost all year, and now that it’s warm enough to want to swim, a pool is an even stronger lure. If your children are hurt in someone else pool, you have a right to pursue a claim.
Source: FindLaw, “Is Your Swimming Pool an Attractive Nuisance?,” Andrew Lu, accessed March 29, 2017
Michael Zimmerman
Michael was born in Houston, Texas. His education at Baylor and Texas State Universities earned him a Bachelor of Science degree in 1987. His major was in Biology with a Minor in Chemistry. He finished his legal education at Texas Southern University in 1990, earning a Juris Doctorate from Thurgood Marshall School of Law. He was admitted to the State Bar of Texas in 1990.
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