Today, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) announces the long-overdue recall of more than five million Chinese-made above-ground swimming pools due to a flaw that resulted in the drowning deaths of at least nine children. Drowning is the leading cause of death for children ages 1 to 4. Under new leadership, CPSC has finally secured a recall to address a hazard the agency first learned about in 2007.

These pools, manufactured in China and sold by Chinese-owned companies Bestway, Intex, and Polygroup, include a strap that wraps around the outside of the vertical support poles, creating footholds that allow young children to climb into the pool even when the ladder is removed. This is a textbook example of a dangerous design flaw, plainly visible and clearly hazardous. At least nine children aged 22 months to 3 years drowned as a direct result of this hazard. CPSC has identified other drowning incidents with these products where it is less clear how the child got into the pool or where children were rescued.

Years of inaction allowed these tragedies to occur. Previous Commission leadership failed to act despite multiple CPSC incident reports attributing deaths to the straps. At the beginning of the Biden administration, reports linked more than a decade of preventable child drownings to this hazard. The ninth known fatality occurred in 2022. Instead of recalling these products, then-Chairman Hoehn-Saric and his majority on the Commission were distracted elsewhere. This was unacceptable.

It was only in March 2024, during a meeting with an outside safety advocate, that the two of us discovered the severity of the hazard, the strength of the evidence, and the sheer number of reports that had been ignored. Commissioners Boyle and Trumka refused that meeting. We immediately called for a recall, a request that went unheeded. Only after a change in agency leadership were we able to successfully negotiate this recall, the largest of its kind in agency history.

We urge all families to take this recall seriously. If you own one of these pools, obtain a repair kit immediately and remove the compression strap. Do not allow children near the pool until the repair is complete.

Today’s recall is another example of our efforts to refocus CPSC on its core mission to address the product hazards that pose the greatest risk to our nation’s children. We owe at least that much to the families who have already suffered unimaginable loss.