(NEW YORK) — Inflatable structures like bounce houses and moonwalks are staples at children’s birthday parties and summer carnivals. Despite the fun they bring, the wind can make them dangerous — it’s something multiple families found out the hard way this year.
Shock and chaos ensued as families rushed for cover at an Alabama work picnic last Saturday, when strong winds swept away an inflatable slide during a severe thunderstorm.
“I’ve never seen a bounce house take off like that,” witness Joshua Cofield said. “It was just a crazy, freak accident. I was shocked. I was not expecting it because from where I was at, I could not see the bounce house, but when it came into the frame, it blew my mind.”
Cofield and other witnesses stated that the two inflatables knocked over by the storm each had four to six stakes to secure them to the ground, but even that wasn’t enough.
Experts from safety group Weather to Bounce say all inflatables should have stakes firmly planted in the ground, along with sandbags to weigh them down.
Saturday’s incident just one of many weather-related incidents involving large inflatables, which can cause serious injury and even death.
In April, a bounce house incident in Casa Grande, Arizona, killed a 2-year-old child. Another child was injured when the inflatable was carried away by the wind and landed in a neighboring lot.
Also in April, a Victorville, California, family experienced some turbulent weather that created a frightening scene. A video captured a dust devil forming in their backyard and whipping a bounce house high into the air while children were playing in the pool.
“It was very dangerous,” homeowner Yvonne Iribe said.
A University of Georgia study found that wind-related bounce house accidents injured at least 479 people and killed 28 worldwide from 2000 to 2021, with those numbers only rising since.
Wendy and Mitch Hammond spoke out about a horrifying incident that befell them in July 2019, after their kids Lizzy, Danny and Abby were invited to a birthday party in Reno, Nevada. The festivities included an inflatable bounce house and slide.
A sudden gust of wind lifted both inflatables into the air — Lizzy, Danny and the birthday boy were trapped inside the bounce house.
“It flew over me and as I stood up is when I turned and saw the bounce house up in the power lines hanging there,” Wendy Hammond said.
She recalled the family trying to get the bounce house down.
“It was out of reach. First responders get there. And they had too short of a ladder on their fire truck,” she said. “So then we all had to wait. While you’re screaming up at the bounce house, trying to see which kid you can hear.”
Rescuers reached the children and the boys were treated for minor injuries. However, 9-year-old Lizzy did not survive.
“It was blunt force trauma to the spine,” Mitch Hammond said. “And at that point, we decided to put her on life support and tried to harvest what we could to help other kids.”
Days later, family and friends honored Lizzy’s life with an emotional honor walk at the hospital.
The Hammonds now operate the Lizzy Hammond Foundation, to educate and advocate for legislative change. What gives them peace is knowing their late daughter’s organs gave life to others.
“I would like her legacy to be that she saved three kids, you know?” Mitch Hammond said. “So she still was a giver all the way to the very end.”
(NEW YORK) — More than 10,000 books were removed from school library shelves over the 2023-2024 school year, free expression advocacy group PEN America said in a new report released Monday at the start of national Banned Books Week. The tally marks a nearly triple-fold increase from the 3,362 bans in the previous school year.
The count includes books both temporarily and indefinitely removed from shelves.
About 8,000 of these book removals were recorded in just two states: Florida and Iowa. Both states have laws in place restricting content related to sex, gender and LGBTQ content.
The book bans have overwhelmingly featured stories that are by or about people of color and the LGBTQ community, according to PEN America.
The study also found that the book-banning efforts have increasingly restricted stories by and about women and girls, and include depictions of or topics concerning rape or sexual abuse.
The restrictions have impacted titles by well-known authors including James Baldwin, Agatha Christie, Alice Walker, Jodi Picoult, Toni Morrison and more.
PEN America predicts higher book removal totals are to come as more laws concerning content restriction are set to impact classrooms in the ongoing 2024-2025 year.
This includes laws like Utah’s H.B. 29, signed in March, which requires all schools to remove a book if school officials from at least three school districts or at least two school districts and five charter schools have determined that a book constitutes “objective sensitive material.”
Critics of these laws say they are akin to censorship, while supporters argue that these laws protect students from what they believe to be inappropriate content.
PEN America found that both legislation and political “parents rights” groups were two key factors in the spike in book removals.
“Our numbers are certainly an undercount, as stories of book bans often go unreported,” PEN America stated in the report. “These numbers also do not account for the many reports of soft censorship, including increased hesitancy in book selection, ideologically-driven restrictions of school book purchases, the removal of classroom collections, and the cancellations of author visits and book fairs.”
(TAMPA, Fla.) — It has been more than 100 years since Florida’s Tampa Bay area – a region especially vulnerable to storm surge and flooding – faced a direct hit by a hurricane.
But Hurricane Milton is now heading straight for Florida’s Gulf Coast, with landfall and a 15-foot storm surge possible in Tampa by late Wednesday night, meaning residents are racing to evacuate ahead of the storm even as they continue to clean up the damage from Hurricane Helene.
Here’s why Hurricane Milton is posing such a threat to the Tampa Bay region:
Why is Tampa susceptible to flooding and storm surge?
The two major surrounding bodies of water – the Gulf of Mexico and surrounding bays – as well as the low-lying coastline make the Tampa Bay area especially susceptible to storm surge, according to experts.
The continental shelf in the Gulf of Mexico extends far offshore, up to 150 miles in some spots, according to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. When water gets “shoved” onto the coast from tropical systems, it has nowhere to go but onto the land, Marshall Shepherd, director of the Atmospheric Sciences Program at the University of Georgia and former president of the American Meteorological Society, told ABC News.
Additionally, when it comes to storm surge, it isn’t the strength of the storm that matters, but rather the size, Shepherd noted. That’s because the larger is the storm system, the longer water gets pushed onto shore, according to Josh Dozor, general manager of medical and security assistance at International SOS, a risk mitigation company, and former deputy assistant administrator of FEMA.
“When you have a large storm, it enables the gradual, continuous buildup of storm surge as it approaches,” Dozor told ABC News. ” … That 10 to 15 feet of storm surge could result in 10 to 15 feet over what is normally dry land.”
It isn’t uncommon for rising waters from Hillsborough Bay, which comprises the northeast arm of Tampa Bay, to spill onto Bayshore Boulevard, a scenic waterfront roadway in South Tampa that serves as recreation for residents, as well as a common route for drivers. Bayshore Boulevard flooded ahead of and during Hurricane Helene, when the storm surge was less than is currently forecast for Hurricane Milton.
Hurricane Helene’s impact is still fresh
The Tampa Bay region is nowhere near done with recovery and cleanup from Hurricane Helene, which made landfall Sept. 30 and brought six feet of storm surge to the Tampa area’s coastlines. The storm’s size allowed for that surge to infiltrate homes and businesses along the Gulf Coast from Cedar Key to Fort Meyers – each of which is about two hours north and south of Tampa, respectively – residents told ABC News.
In Dunedin, Florida, located on the Gulf Coast at the northernmost tip of Tampa Bay, mountains of debris still litter the streets and people were still airing out their belongings when evacuation orders for Hurricane Milton were issued, Dunedin resident Candace Allaire, 39, COO of the Crown & Bull restaurant, told ABC News.
While the restaurant’s newly renovated kitchen weathered the brunt of Helene’s damage, the rest of the neighborhood was destroyed, Allaire said. Many homes for Allaire’s family and employees, as well as neighboring restaurants, had four feet of standing water in them for hours as Helene barreled through, she said.
The emotional toll of Helene less than two weeks ago, and Hurricane Ian two years ago, is still pervasive in the community. Rebecca Kuppler, mother to a 4-year-old son and 2-year-old daughter, lost everything in Hurricane Helene. The family had evacuated to Orlando ahead of the storm and heard from neighbors that the water line was rising higher and higher, she told ABC News.
“It’s not stuff,” Kuppler said of the loss. “It’s our home, it’s the memories, it’s the love, the time you put into that, and that’s what’s been really hard.”
The pile of debris outside of Kuppler’s home was still there as the forecasts for Hurricane Milton began, prompting the family to evacuate yet again.
The back-to-back storms are reminiscent of the 2004 hurricane season, when Hurricanes Charley, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne all struck Florida within a six-week period.
“It’s an extreme amount of stress, and if it happens once in a while, I think people can weather it,” Dozor told ABC News. “But when it happens a couple times a year or a couple times every few years, it takes a great toll on people.”
How climate change is increasing the storm risk in the Tampa Bay region
The extreme threat from hurricanes that the Tampa Bay region faces is also likely being influenced by our changing climate.
Human-amplified climate change is the primary cause for present-day rising sea levels, according to a consensus of climate scientists. It’s also triggering more frequent and more intense extreme rainfall events, experts say.
While many factors contribute to the magnitude and impact of storm surge and coastal flooding, average sea levels for many Gulf Coast communities are more than six inches higher today than they were just a few decades ago, data shows.
Human-amplified climate change also likely affected how fast Hurricane Milton intensified as it tracked over the warmer than average waters of the southern Gulf of Mexico, according to researchers. The record-high sea surface temperatures observed in this region over the past two weeks were made up to 400 to 800 times more likely by climate change, according to a rapid attribution analysis by Climate Central.
Warm ocean waters provide the energy hurricanes need to form and intensify. The warmer the water, the more powerful the storms typically are.
While a link has been established between the unusually warm sea surface temperatures and human-caused climate change, it is not yet known to what degree that climate change may have influenced Hurricane Milton’s development.
How Tampa Bay is preparing for the storm
Mandatory evacuations are in place for six counties in Florida, with Tampa at the center of the threat. Airports, businesses and schools from Tampa to Naples, some 170 miles south, are closing in preparation for Milton.
The Tampa area is one of the top five places for evacuations due to potential storm surge, Dozor said. Tampa Mayor Jane Castor issued a dire warning, urging those in the evacuation zones to heed evacuation mandates.
“If you choose to stay in one of the evacuation areas, you are going to die,” Castor said in an interview with CNN Monday night.
While FEMA and emergency management at the state and local levels report that they are adequately prepared for Hurricane Milton, it is incumbent upon residents to follow instructions and get themselves out of harm’s way in a timely manner, Dozor said. In highly populated cities along the Tampa peninsula, like Tampa, St. Petersburg and Clearwater, it is important for people to leave early because of the limited roadways.
“There are a lot of bottlenecks that hinder quick and efficient movement of populations to be able to leave the peninsula of Tampa,” he said.
It appears that residents are heeding the warnings, Dozor noted. Beginning on Monday, standstill traffic could be seen for miles on I-75 and the Sunshine Skyway, the bridge that spans the Tampa Bay, as residents embarked on a mass exodus to safety.
At 4 a.m. on Tuesday, Candace Allaire and her fiancé evacuated north to Destin, in Florida’s panhandle, to ride out the storm. Fuel was hard to come by in preparation of their road trip, she said.
In addition, hotel availability is most major Florida cities to which residents might evacuate – such as Fort Lauderdale, Gainesville and Jacksonville – is already extremely low, Dozor said.
“All the hotels are reserved for people who’ve obviously been evacuated,” he said.