Never take pool safety for granted, mother says

ADAM BUTTON

PETER LEE, RECORD STAFF Bianca Benini, 3, nearly drowned during a vacation at a Dominican Republic resort, and her mother, Fiorella, was angry to realize the resort had no one on staff trained in CPR.

(Apr 27, 2004)

Fiorella Benini can't forget her daughter's blue face.

After the tiny three-year-old was pulled from the pool of a resort in the Dominican Republic, Benini froze in shock.

"When I saw her, I thought I'd lost my daughter. I thought I was coming home without a kid," she says of Bianca.

Thankfully, Benini's sister, who is also the child's godmother, acted quickly and performed life-saving CPR.

Benini is now upset with the lax safety measures at the hotel and wants to warn parents to be on guard when they travel abroad.

She says the near drowning occurred because a playground was built alongside the pool at her resort in Punta Cana.

The incident happened early this month on the first day of the family's vacation. Bianca was on the swing set and Benini left her side for only a moment.

Her husband, Brian Laude, was nearby.

"We would never leave her alone at the pool," he says. "But we were in playground mode."

When Benini returned, her daughter was missing.

"She was right here," Laude kept saying as they hastily searched for her.

Benini is upset because she says hotel management was unprepared and unrepentant. After the family spent a night at the hospital wondering if Bianca had brain damage, they came back to the all-inclusive resort and were offered a fancy dinner.

Although there are more than 400 rooms in the resort, the pool is unsupervised and staff members aren't required to know CPR.

When hotel officials in the Dominican Republic were contacted they denied any recollection of the incident and said they have a doctor at the resort.

But the doctor wasn't stationed nearby and the child would have been dead by the time he arrived, Benini says.

Rick Haga, executive director of the Lifesaving Society, a water-safety organization based in Ottawa, says that although Canadian hotels tend to be designed with more safety in mind, the laws are no different.

"It's a classic situation," he says. "The same thing could happen here."

According to the Red Cross, drowning trails only car collisions in causing accidental death among Canadian children between the ages of one and four.

"The majority of hotel pools in Canada tend to be at your own risk," Haga says.

But the difference is that most major Canadian hotels have staff trained in CPR.

Locally, hotels with pools were split. Officials at the Waterloo Inn and Conference Centre as well as the Four Points by Sheraton said they always have someone in the hotel who can do CPR. At the Howard Johnson Hotel, manager Leigh-Ann McNeil said, "I don't think we have anybody with CPR, but children under 16 aren't allowed in the pool without a parent."

Bianca is fine now -- the very next day she wanted back in the water -- but Benini says the incident should act as a warning.

"You think children have a protective barrier around them because they get hurt and they're always fine, but they're so fragile."