Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, June 29, 1993 TAG: 9306290013
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Ed Shamy
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
A slide is a basic playground element. It's a ladder that leads up to a metal chute. The idea is to climb, sit and slide.
A slide can teach a lot to a kid. Gravity, for starters. And heat transfer. Gravity notwithstanding, you only sit once in your life on a metal slide if you're wearing short pants on a hot, sunny day. Once you get over the second-degree burns on your derriere, you never do it again.
But cool slides also can be dangerous. All that climbing! All that height! The velocity!
Given the obvious perils of the slide, it's a wonder there are so many old people around today. By all rights, their small, child-sized bones should lie bleached beneath the slide, grisly testimony to their unsuccessful attempts to tame the playground beast.
Alas, the slide is falling into disfavor for the very reasons it enjoyed such a long and successful run. Any toy that offers a climb and an exhilarating rush to the bottom has outgrown its days as a clever way to entertain children.
It's a lawsuit waiting to happen, a invitation that has "sue me" written all over it.
Children can fall from the ladder! They can fall from the slide! They can be ushered into the courtroom in neck braces, where they can sob on cue and wrest millions of dollars from slide manufacturers, slide installers, slide inventors, playground supervisors, park maintenance workers and school systems.
"Wherein and wheretofore the defendant did knowingly offer the injured party access to this slide, said injured party does ask for an award not less than $4,379,000,000.66."
Unwilling to risk that kind of cash, and knowing full well that a single kid in a neck brace could sway any jury, the Roanoke County school system is taking a simple preventive step to guard against crippling accidents and even-more crippling lawsuits.
At Mason's Cove and Burlington elementary schools, the county has piled soil beneath and around slides, covering the ladders' rungs and encasing all but the chute in soil.
Permanently altering the county topography, the slides run like lava flows down the sides of volcano-sized mounds of dirt.
"We're looking at safety-proofing as many things in our playgrounds as we can," says Jack Liddy, who administers physical education in county schools.
The volcanoes eliminate the need to climb a ladder; youngsters climb the volcano instead. Should they tumble from the chute, they roll down the man-made mountainside instead of plummeting into a body cast and a sure-fire lawsuit. At no point is the child at risk more than six inches off the ground.
The old slides, said Liddy, were just too tall for elementary schoolkids, "10 feet tall and nothing underneath."
Whenever a county crew had a load of dirt, they dumped it beneath the slides. If you can't lower the slide, raise the ground.
"It didn't cost anything, except time," Liddy said.
Some wag has dubbed the slide along Peters Creek Road "Mount Burlington."
What happens the first time a kid rolls down the volcano and breaks a bone?
That's a question, not a lawyer joke.
by CNB