A glorious swan dive off a diving board may be beautiful enough to blow your mind, but some people may also think it has a high potential of blowing your back into paralysis. While diving board injuries are a reality, they may not be as common as you think, reports the American Institutes for Research, or AIR.
Skewed Statistics
Diving injury statistics are readily available from sources such as the Spinal Cord Injury Information Network, the RAND report and a 2003 AIR study. Not so readily available are statistics that separate out injuries from diving off a board and diving off the side of the pool, or even diving into an ocean, lake or other natural body of water. Some agencies, like the Spinal Cord Injury Information Network, do ferret out diving board injuries while others combine them into other statistics.
How Frequent?
Out of the 100 to 150 diving injuries that occur in swimming pools every year, only about five to 10 of them are injuries from jumping off a diving board, according to the Spinal Cord Injury Information Network. The vast majority of all injuries -- 90 percent -- are in water less than 7 or 8 feet deep. About half of all the injuries are in water less than 4 feet deep. About half of the diving board injuries usually involve the use of alcohol.
How Likely?
You are more likely to die from a lightning strike, tornadoes or drowning than you are likely to become a quadriplegic or paraplegic from diving in a pool, according to The RAND statistics collected by AIR. The RAND report looked at a number of events over a 20-year span to determine which posed the most risk. Becoming a paraplegic or quadriplegic from pool diving ranked near the bottom, with only 0.04 per 100,000 people. The statistics dropped even lower for diving in a pool with water greater than 6 feet deep, with only 0.004 per 100,000. While these diving injuries ranked lower than car crashes, suicides and death by poison gas, they did beat out death by meteorite.
Diving Board vs. Other Diving
One of the reports that does break out diving board injuries from the rest of the bunch includes a survey by DeVivo and Sekar. The firm followed up with a number of individuals who reported spinal cord diving injuries between 1973 and 1994 and asked how they received those injuries. Low board diving accounted for 8.6 percent of the overall diving injuries, while high board diving accounted for 1.6 percent. Diving off competition blocks led to 4.9 percent of the injuries, diving off the ladder or stairs led to 4.2 percent and other or unknown combined into 9.4 percent. The 76.8 majority of injuries were from diving off none of these devices, but rather from the side of the pool. One more skew to be noted, however, may be the lower amount of people who use high diving boards versus those who use lower boards.
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