IRVINE : Council to Consider Pool Safety Rules

The City Council will consider adopting stricter pool safety requirements Tuesday evening after a public hearing at City Hall.

The proposed swimming pool ordinance would require that all new pools or hot tubs built within the city be equipped with two sets of barriers or alarms to guard against children drowning. The U.S. Consumer Products Safety Commission has endorsed the city requirements as a way to reduce accidental deaths.

Swimming pool drownings are the leading cause of accidental death among children ages 1 to 4, according to the safety commission.

Under existing city codes, pools must be walled off from access from outside the property. No protective measures are required to prevent children who are inside the property from entering the water.

Under the city’s proposed law, new swimming pool owners would be required to install a separate fence around the pool with a self-closing gate or install two sets of physical barriers or alarms between the home and the water.

As a first barrier, all doors leading out to the water would be required to close and latch automatically, or an alarm must sound if the door were opened without first activating a switch at least five feet off the floor. As a second barrier, pools would have to have a motorized pool cover or some type of alarm that would sound if a child entered the pool.

As written, the city’s proposed ordinance would not affect the estimated 8,000 existing back-yard pools. Two city planning commissioners recommended that existing pools also be covered, but were overruled by the three other commissioners in a public hearing earlier this month.