From kids falling from 15 feet in the air out of airborne bounce houses to fractured legs and arms, bounce castle injuries are becoming very common. Recently, in two separate incidents in New York and Colorado, gusts of wind threw bounce houses into the sky and across fields with children inside.

In New York, the bounce house was airborne and dropping children from heights of up to 15 feet in the process. This bounce house went so high that it was able to clear a two-story house before finally landing in a field. In Colorado, a bounce house tumbled for hundreds of feet across a field before it landed.

In addition to these, highly publicized accidents, emergency rooms receive plenty of children with broken arms and legs from bounce house accidents. In a study published in the journal Pediatrics by the Center for Injury Research and Policy in 2012, the researchers pointed out that an average of 31 children per day were seen in emergency rooms for “an inflatable bouncer-related injury.” The lack of regulation makes bounce castles potentially hazardous. Tracy Mehan, a health educator with the Child Injury Prevention Alliance says of the 11,000 annual injuries, “If this were a disease, it would be considered an epidemic.”

Image courtesy of time.com