Bill to Require Pool Alarms after Boy's Drowning

Beth Janicek

Attorney
(866) 735-1102 Ext 395

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On June 6, 2007, 3-year-old Anthony Muniz drowned in a neighbor's backyard pool. Anthony climbed a fence after slipping out of his Long Island home. The fence was four feet tall, as required by Brookhaven law. The city of Hempstead, which is very close to Brookhaven, has a law requiring the fence to be five feet and six feet in North Hempstead. Additionally, since this pool was built 30 years ago, it was exempt from a new state law that requires alarms of new or renovated pools.

There are no national laws on pool safety. A bill to authorize federal grants to states that adopt stricter standards is being revised in a Congressional subcommittee after passing the Senate but falling short in the House last year.

In enacting the pool alarm law in December, New York joined Connecticut, which required alarms on new and renovated pools starting last year. New Jersey, like some other states, requires fences and self-closing, self-latching gates for new and renovated pools, and allows the option of secure covers, rather than an alarm, for hot tubs. Florida and California list alarms as one of several ways to meet their pool safety requirements.

Now Anthony's memory is building momentum for a bill to require pool alarms -- $200 to $300 devices that sound when someone enters an untended pool -- that had been languishing in the Suffolk County Legislature. Jon Cooper, the Democratic majority leader, who introduced the bill in April, said that he had picked up six co-sponsors since Anthony's death, and that when he tried to buy an alarm for a demonstration, the first three stores he tried were sold out.