Playgrounds and outdoor playground equipment can offer your child enjoyment, fresh air, and exercise, but they can also pose some safety hazards. Faulty equipment, improper surfaces, and careless behavior are just a few of the dangers that cause children on playgrounds to visit hospital emergency departments. To ensure that your children have the safest playground environment possible, follow these guidelines.
• In the United States, a child is injured on a playground every 2 1/2 minutes. • More than 200,000 children each year are treated in emergency departments for playground-related injuries. • More than 75% of playground injuries occur on a public playground. • Most playground injuries involve falls, and over half of the time the child’s head and face is hurt. • Most of these injuries are preventable with proper supervision and safer playground equipment and design.
You can make the playground a place that’s entertaining and safe for your children by checking equipment for potential hazards and following some simple safety guidelines. In addition, teaching your kids how to play safely is important: if they know the rules of the playground, it’s less likely they’ll become injured.
Safety Guidelines
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention funds the National Program for Playground Safety (NPPS), which works to prevent playground-related injuries by establishing detailed guidelines for safe playgrounds. According to the NPPS, the most important factors in evaluating the safety of any playground are surface, design and spacing, equipment installation, and maintenance.
The following types of equipment are not meant for safe playgrounds:
• animal figure swings • glider swings that hold more than one child at a time • swinging ropes that can fray, unravel, or form a noose (any kind of rope attached to play equipment poses a strangulation hazard, so never let your child tie jump ropes or leashes onto the equipment) • exercise rings (as used in gymnastics) and trapeze bars • Monkey bars: although people use the terms monkey bars, jungle gyms, and climbing equipment interchangeably, actual monkey bars are a specific type of climbing equipment with interior bars onto which a child may fall from a height greater than 18 inches. In the early 1980s, the CPSC stated that monkey bars were unsuitable for playgrounds. • trampolines: these are never appropriate for safe playgrounds
By: James Hunt
Posts Tagged ‘Outdoor Playground Equipment’
Safe Playground Equipment Guidelines
September 23rd, 2009Park playground: Koochieplay.com provides quality outdoor playground equipment
August 29th, 2009If you are planning to open an amusement center for kids then it is really a good thing. Like land and the location of the park, the park equipment installed for the kids also play an important role to attract more number of kids to your newly established fun zone. A park with comfortable benches set along the pathways has a much more welcoming ambiance than a park with nowhere to sit. A park with picnic benches and bicycle racks invites people to linger. Parks that host sports teams are more pleasant for players and spectators alike if there are bleachers and a player’s bench. Park equipment need not be limited to the park, however. Many families are finding that park-quality equipment is ideal for their own backyards because of its durability and attractiveness. Since it’s made to withstand heavy wear and extremes of weather, it can easily stand up to normal family usage.
Step by step Procedure to decorate a park:
1. Buy materials. It is essential that you should purchase all the products and amenities at the best market prices. Certainly, for the sake of best prices you cannot sacrifice the quality offered to you. Besides quality, there are various other things as well that you should look upon before making a purchase. Buy some wood worked material which is used in park.
2. Set the posts. These are all set so that the distance between the inside faces of each pair of posts is 22 inches. Do everything you can to make this precise, but know that it still probably won’t be. You’ll likely have to take some corrective measures later.
3. Install the slide. The next thing is assemble and hang the slides.
4. Build the platforms. Build one platform at a time, working from the bottom up so there’s plenty of room to run your drill and/or screwdriver from above. Orient the 2-by-4 supports so they always point toward you as you go from one level to the next. That’s so little fingers can grab onto the slats as kids boost themselves up the structure.
5. Install the monkey bars. The four posts supporting the monkey bars require tricky notch cuts to accept the 12-foot 2-by-6 rails so the rails will be 22 inches apart. Position the 11 horizontal monkey bars a foot apart before you attach any of them, adjusting them if necessary for even spacing. Again, if the posts were set right initially, the spacing will be correct. Use the shorter lag screws to attach the horizontal bars.
6. Attach the ladders and sides of the top platform. Using the longer lag screws, attach two rungs 1 and 2 feet up from the final play surface on the remote posts. Also mount the climber rungs on the sides of the posts, as shown in the drawing. Attach the 2-by-6s on the sides of the top platform last, spacing them 1 inch apart. Chisel out the ends of the two 2-by-6s that overlap the climber rungs so the 2-by-6s can be mounted flush to the post.
7. Attach the steering wheels. Mount a 2-by-4 20 inches above the second platform to support one of the steering wheels; center the other wheel in the top 2-by-6 on the top platform.
8. Spread your base material. Robyn had vetoed bark chips, sand, and gravel as being too unattractive and/or messy.
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By: santosh bhol
