When young children fall into pools when there is no one around to look after them, the worst can happen. When older children – or even adults – bump their heads in the pool, drownings can also occur. While not every drowning is fatal and might see quick resuscitation, some damage might already be done.
Our attorneys will help you get compensation for a drowning injury, whether it resulted in soreness and fear alone or whether it resulted in serious hypoxia injuries or even death. When pursuing a potential case, it is important to have a lawyer help you understand what you can claim, who you can claim it against, and how to go about pursuing justice.
Contact The Reiff Law Firm for a free case review with our swimming pool drowning attorneys at (215) 709-6940.
Suing for Swimming Pool Drowning Injuries and Death in Lansdale, PA
Swimming pools often create liability for property owners when they fail to properly secure and supervise their pools. While they might be great to have around in the summer, pools are also a danger to children, disabled people, and even potentially to swimmers who feel up to the safety tasks involved. When things go wrong, you can often sue for injuries by proving the following four elements:
Duty
For anyone to be responsible for what happens in a pool, there must be a legal duty imposed on them. These duties usually come from the relationship between the person and the pool owner. In many cases, the standard will be specific to what a reasonable pool owner should do in the same situation.
For example, reasonable pool owners should put up fences around their pool to keep their neighbors’ children from potentially wandering over and falling into the pool. This requirement comes from a doctrine called the “attractive nuisance” doctrine. Additionally, when a pool owner is left to supervise a friend’s child or a child’s friend, they must take reasonable steps to help the kids avoid injury.
In some cases, the duty is imposed not on the pool owner but on someone else supervising the child, like a babysitter, a lifeguard, or another adult/older teen. With lifeguards, there is sometimes no affirmative duty to save everyone who needs help. Even so, once they undertake that task, they have a duty to carry it out in a reasonable manner.
Breach
For someone to be held liable for a swimming pool drowning accident, our swimming pool drowning attorneys need to point to something they did wrong to violate the legal duty. This breach of duty is essential; people cannot be held responsible when they did nothing wrong.
Causation
We also must show that the breach of duty was the thing that actually caused the drowning to happen. In many cases, someone begins to drown not because of poor supervision but because of horseplay or recklessness in the pool that caused a head injury. In these cases, the fact that someone else in the pool did something dangerous might cut off the pool owner’s liability. Instead, the reckless swimmer would be at fault.
In some cases, the legal issue at hand is not whether the breach caused them to drown but how they reacted to the drowning. For example, an adult who was entrusted with watching a child must reasonably react to help them regardless of what caused the child to drown. Even if they were hypervigilant before the drowning, if they unreasonably reacted to the emergency situation, they might have caused a drowning to go on or get worse.
Damages
In drowning cases, the damages you suffer are the injuries themselves or the loss of a loved one. In addition, you can get financial compensation for other damages, such as medical bills related to the injury and pain and suffering.
Pain and suffering damages are likely to be important in your case, whether there was much physical injury or not. Drowning is scary, and it can leave you with PTSD and other ongoing emotional distress that could result in high damages even if you were ultimately saved.
Families who lose a loved one also face many additional damages, from lost companionship to burial and funeral bills. These should also be compensated in a wrongful death suit for drowning.
Injuries Involved in Swimming Pool Drowning Cases in Lansdale, PA
When it comes to drowning, the potential injuries involved are more than just death. Many people survive drownings but are left with other injuries that could range quite broadly in severity:
Chest Pain
If you walk away from drowning with nothing but chest pain, you might be quite lucky – but it might not feel like it right away. Inhaling water and coughing it up hurts your lungs and chest muscles, and the CPR needed to resuscitate you might have even broken a few ribs. These are all foreseeable injuries related to a drowning accident and can result in compensation.
PTSD
As mentioned, a brush with drowning can leave you with a lot of fears and anxieties to process. The emotional distress and mental anguish related to the accident itself – along with the cost of mental health therapy – should result in monetary damages. You might not even need an official PTSD diagnosis to get compensation for the trauma you experienced and its effects on your mental health.
Brain Injuries
If your drowning happened because you were hit in the head, you could have traumatic brain injuries that need compensation.
In addition to the possibility of traumatic brain injuries, the lack of oxygen during the drowning can result in hypoxia or anoxia, which can cause brain damage as well. These injuries might even place the victim in a coma or persistent vegetative state, resulting in immense pain and suffering damages.
Death
Many drownings are ultimately fatal. When someone dies from drowning, their family is often entitled to damages not only for the economic harms but also the lost companionship and other harms the family faces. In addition, they can claim compensation for the pain, suffering, and distress their loved one faced before death. If they lingered in a persistent vegetative state before death, that might increase their suffering and increase the potential compensation the family deserves.
Call Our Swimming Pool Drowning Lawyers in Lansdale for Help
Call our swimming pool drowning attorneys from The Reiff Law Firm for help with your case today by dialing (215) 709-6940.
