Tube Kiters Warned of Dangers

June 30, 2006 — -- The Fourth of July weekend is a time to celebrate summer. It's one of the biggest weekends of the year for outdoor activities and water sports. But as this holiday weekend gets under way, the government agency in charge of protecting the public from injuries related to consumer products is sounding a warning about a new breed of extreme summer fun.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission has focused attention on a new water sport called tube kiting. A tube kite is a large inner tube that, when pulled behind a boat at high enough speeds, can fly off the water and into the air.

The CPSC announced Friday that it is investigating tube kites to determine whether they're too dangerous for consumer use. The agency is aware of two deaths this year from the relatively new extreme sport and believes the danger might have something to do with the difficulty of controlling the tube kite once it is in the air.

"We'll look and see and re-create and investigate for ourselves how the product might respond," said Julie Vallese, a spokesperson for the commission.

The CPSC's action comes two days after the Tulsa district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers banned the use of tube kites on the lakes it manages after seeing a rash of serious injuries on tube kites around the country.

"They're just coming in right and left -- fatalities and serious injuries," said Ross Adkins, the chief of public affairs for the Corps' Tulsa district. "We're just asking people if they bring them to deflate them and take them home and not use them," he said.

Further west at Glen Canyon National Park, which straddles Utah and Arizona and includes Lake Powell, tube kites have also been banned.

"We looked at kite tubing in general," said Kevin Schneider, the management assistant at Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. "It was not something that we felt was safe."

Schneider said Glen Canyon's park rangers began seeing tube kites for the first time this boating season. Between April and June there were four tube kiting injuries that were serious enough for the victims to be rushed out of the park by helicopter. A 29-year-old man broke his neck, and a 14-year-old girl was knocked unconscious when she fell to the water.