Most of those children were in the care of their parents, and had been out of sight for less than five minutes.

Even if you have no children and just purchased a kiddie pool to keep your beer chilled, you still can be held liable if a child trespasses onto your property and drowns.

Before installing or buying a pool, hot tub or spa, you should call your insurance agent or company.

Adding a pool to your property increases your liability risk. Insurers consider pools to be “attractive nuisances” because they can draw people onto your property, and they can get hurt. You may be held liable even if you never invited the people and didn’t know they were there. Most homeowners policies have a minimum of about $100,000 in liability protection. Pool owners may want to consider increasing that to $300,000 or $500,000.

However, you might want to go further, and purchase what is called an umbrella liability policy. This is a policy that sits on top of your homeowners and car insurance policies, and provides up to $1 million in liability coverage for a premium of $200 to $300 a year. This policy isn’t just to protect you from the possible pool accidents, it would cover other potential liabilities, including car accidents.

If you install a pool, you also might consider increasing your insurance coverage so that you could replace or repair the pool if it was damaged in a storm. Your pool would be covered as an “other structure” under your homeowners policy. This also would include sheds and detached garages.
Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4