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Five Kids in Hospital: What Last Weekend's Jumping Castle Accidents Mean for Your Party
On Saturday 5 September, five children were taken to hospital in two separate incidents on the east coast. In both cases a jumping castle was lifted off the ground by wind.
At a birthday party at Mount Duneed near Geelong, two primary school aged children were taken to Geelong University Hospital with upper body injuries. At Banksia in southern Sydney, a boy and a girl were taken to Sydney Children's Hospital with head injuries, along with an infant with minor injuries and a woman treated at the scene. All were reported in a stable condition. Sydney gusts that afternoon peaked above 60km/h.
If you have a party booked in the next few weeks and you are now wondering whether to cancel, this one is for you.
Australia has a standard covering exactly this — AS 3533.4.1:2018, for land-borne inflatable devices. Every castle has a set number of anchor points and a minimum pegging or ballast requirement from its manufacturer. Skip a few pegs because the ground is hard, or use sandbags lighter than they should be, and you have not cut a corner. You have built a kite.
Forty km/h is not a storm. It is a gusty spring afternoon in Perth. That is exactly the point — the conditions that lift a castle are not dramatic weather, they are an ordinary windy day meeting a setup that was not anchored properly.
WorkSafe WA also recommends something most people never hear about: that operators measure the wind with an anemometer, rather than standing in the yard and guessing.Every Kanga Kingdom hire now comes with an anemometer — a handheld wind meter, left with you for the whole booking At setup we show you how to hold it, how to read a gust, and the exact number at which the castle needs to stop If it reads over 40km/h, everyone comes off and the castle gets deflated. Call us and we will talk you through it or come back and pack it down No argument, and no charge for shutting it down early The reason is simple. We check the forecast before we leave and we measure gusts on site before handover — but we are not at your party at three in the afternoon. You are. We would rather you had the instrument in your hand than take our word for it.
That sits alongside what we already do: pegging to the manufacturer specification with no exceptions, a rated ballast arrangement where stakes will not go into paving, a pull test on the anchors before we hand the castle over, and $20 million public liability cover.
But it is worth knowing that in WA a continuously blown inflatable only needs registration with WorkSafe if its platform height is 3 metres or more. Most backyard party castles sit well under that, which means no registration, no mandatory inspection, and nobody checking the operator's work. The responsibility sits entirely with the hire company.
So ask questions before you book. We have written the full guide — including the five questions that will tell you in about ninety seconds whether an operator knows what they are doing — here: Are jumping castles safe? An honest answer from a Perth operator.
Any operator worth booking will be glad you asked.
Questions about your booking or the forecast for your date? Call us on 0493 595 965 or book online.
At a birthday party at Mount Duneed near Geelong, two primary school aged children were taken to Geelong University Hospital with upper body injuries. At Banksia in southern Sydney, a boy and a girl were taken to Sydney Children's Hospital with head injuries, along with an infant with minor injuries and a woman treated at the scene. All were reported in a stable condition. Sydney gusts that afternoon peaked above 60km/h.
If you have a party booked in the next few weeks and you are now wondering whether to cancel, this one is for you.
It was not the castle. It was the wind.
This is the part that gets lost in the reporting. Inflatables do not spontaneously fail. The accidents that make the news are almost always the same story: wind, plus anchoring that was never good enough to begin with.Australia has a standard covering exactly this — AS 3533.4.1:2018, for land-borne inflatable devices. Every castle has a set number of anchor points and a minimum pegging or ballast requirement from its manufacturer. Skip a few pegs because the ground is hard, or use sandbags lighter than they should be, and you have not cut a corner. You have built a kite.
The number that matters is 40
WorkSafe WA is unambiguous. An inflatable should be evacuated when wind gusts go over the manufacturer's limit, or over 40km/h where the manufacturer has not set one.Forty km/h is not a storm. It is a gusty spring afternoon in Perth. That is exactly the point — the conditions that lift a castle are not dramatic weather, they are an ordinary windy day meeting a setup that was not anchored properly.
WorkSafe WA also recommends something most people never hear about: that operators measure the wind with an anemometer, rather than standing in the yard and guessing.
What we have changed
We took that recommendation seriously enough to go one better.That sits alongside what we already do: pegging to the manufacturer specification with no exceptions, a rated ballast arrangement where stakes will not go into paving, a pull test on the anchors before we hand the castle over, and $20 million public liability cover.
Should you cancel your party?
No. A properly anchored castle, run by someone who watches the weather and is not afraid to shut it down, is a safe bit of fun. Kids have been bouncing on these things for decades.But it is worth knowing that in WA a continuously blown inflatable only needs registration with WorkSafe if its platform height is 3 metres or more. Most backyard party castles sit well under that, which means no registration, no mandatory inspection, and nobody checking the operator's work. The responsibility sits entirely with the hire company.
So ask questions before you book. We have written the full guide — including the five questions that will tell you in about ninety seconds whether an operator knows what they are doing — here: Are jumping castles safe? An honest answer from a Perth operator.
Any operator worth booking will be glad you asked.
Questions about your booking or the forecast for your date? Call us on 0493 595 965 or book online.
