Tobogganing under threat in U.S. and Canada: Cities instituting bans after sledding injuries lead to lawsuits

NationalPost.com
Jan. 4, 2014
Jen Gerson

It’s been a beloved winter pastime for untold generations of children, but tobogganing is coming under threat in cities across the U.S. and Canada.

Dubuque, Iowa, is set to ban toboggans in nearly all its 50 parks. Other cities, including Des Moines, Iowa; Montville, New Jersey; Lincoln, Nebraska; and Columbia City, Indiana, are following suit by restricting certain runs or posting signs warning people away.

“We have all kinds of parks that have hills on them,” said Marie Ware, Dubuque’s leisure services manager. “We can’t manage the risk at all of those places.”

In Canada, Hamilton has restricted sledding on pain of a hefty fine for almost 15 years; a change.org petition demanding the city “LET US TOBOGGAN!!!!” has garnered more than 1,000 signatures since Nov. 19.

In Toronto, a bylaw has pushed kids off Etobicoke’s Centennial Park Ski Hill for the past several years, deeming it too dangerous. Particularly icy weather conditions will also prompt warnings in Edmonton and elsewhere.

“From an injury prevention perspective, tobogganing turns out to be a very high risk activity,” said Dr. Charles Tator, a member of the board at Parachute Canada, an injury-prevention charity. He’s also a brain surgeon who still remembers one of his first cases, a woman in her 20s who was permanently injured in a toboggan ride with her kids; he said the young mother was put in a wheelchair for life after the accident.

But Dr. Tator doesn’t support the outright bans that are starting to pop up across the continent.

“I don’t like that idea, because we’ll just produce a bunch of fatties and couch potatoes, people who don’t exercise, and that’s not going to get us anywhere,” he said.

To be clear, most of Canada remains firmly entrenched in the pro-toboggan camp; cities like Ottawa and Calgary even offer tips on the best hills in their respective cities — and advice on how to stay safe.

But when things go wrong, it can be expensive for municipalities.

In 2013, the city of Hamilton was ordered to pay lawyer Bruno Uggenti $900,000 after he injured his spine on a toboggan run — this despite the city’s tobogganing ban.

In Edmonton that same year, Samantha Giese filed a $900,000 lawsuit claiming she was injured when her sled collided with a ski jump.

In the U.S., sledding injuries have cost municipalities millions of dollars.

The family of a 5-year-old girl who was paralyzed in Omaha, Nebraska, was awarded a $2-million judgement. A $2.75-million payment was given to a man who injured his spinal cord in Sioux City, Iowa.

Dr. Tator’s 2008 book, Catastrophic Injuries in Sport and Recreation, found that tobogganing was the fourth most risky sport for serious injuries, behind only diving, snowmobiling, and parachuting.

“Most people get away with it and they probably didn’t take any precautions,” he said. “But that isn’t the way it should be. Everybody should take steps to protect themselves.”

Dr. Tator said cities could take steps to make sledding safer, by removing obstacles like trees from designated sledding hills for example. He also encourages kids to wear helmets. He praised Vaughan, Ont., for reforming some of its popular slopes after two children were killed tobogganing in one month in 2007.

Seven people were killed in Canada between 2003 and 2007, but Dr. Tator said he laments this country’s lack of substantive data on the topic.

In the U.S., more than 20,000 children were treated in emergency rooms for sledding related accidents between 1997 and 2007, according to a study by the Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio.

“When we did a survey of sports and recreational causes of catastrophic injury, we found that tobogganing ranks very highly as a cause of major injury, such as brain injury, or spinal cord injury, and this is surprising,” he said.

Most people realize that cities must restrict potentially dangerous activities to protect people and guard against costly lawsuits, said Kenneth Bond, a New York lawyer who represents local governments. In the past, people might have embraced a Wild West philosophy of individuals being solely responsible for their actions, but now they expect government to prevent dangers whenever possible.

“It’s a great idea on the frontier, but we don’t live on the frontier anymore,” Mr. Bond said.

That doesn’t sit well with Natasha Koss, 40, who frequently sleds with her 5-year-old daughter Elsa in Marquette, Mich.

Ms. Koss sometimes requires Elsa to wear a helmet. When they try a particular hill for the first time, her husband does a few runs solo as a precaution. She said she’d report any safety issues to city authorities but couldn’t imagine filing suit over a sledding mishap.

“I would most certainly take personal responsibility,” she said. “You need to have a mindset to make the best decisions for your own safety.”