Victoria Maybee, Centretown News
An Ottawa family climbs the Mooney’s Bay sledding hill earlier this month. The popular site is one of the city’s 57 hills that will remain open this winter.Cold weather will be the only thing stopping Ottawans from zipping down snow-covered hills on GT racers or makeshift sleds. Despite recent tobogganing bans in cities across the United States and Canada, the City of Ottawa is choosing to restrict sledding to 57 approved hills instead of enforcing bans this year.
Tobogganing has come under fire due to liability and safety issues with several cities imposing bylaws to forbid tobogganing.
Hamilton, Ont. outlawed the popular winter pursuit 14 years ago, but despite the ban, in 2013 the ity was ordered to pay $900,000 to a man who suffered spinal injuries after hitting a snow-covered drainage ditch while tobogganing in 2004.
Ottawa has opted for a less drastic approach: restricting sledding to 57 approved toboggan-friendly hills. The city also updates each hill’s conditions and dangers on its website, as well as the dos and don’ts of safe tobogganing. Crazy carpets and building snow ramps top the list of don’ts.
Despite the city’s precautionary steps, Sig Pantazis, a lawyer at Beament Green in Ottawa, says these may be insufficient to prevent a lawsuit. Pantazis says safety signs should be put on the hills that detail specific dangers, such as trees, benches, fences and steel posts, in order to protect the city against lawsuits.
Liability concerns aren’t the only risks associated with tobogganing. Dr. Charles Tator, a neurosurgeon and board member at injury-prevention charity Parachute Canada, says sledding is a “very high risk activity,” with brain and spinal cord injuries among the most common risks.
“Precautions do have to be taken just like in virtually all sports because there are risks in everything. There’s risk in walking down the street or driving, but we need to manage and reduce the risks,” says Tator.
Tator’s 2008 book, Catastrophic Injuries in Sport and Recreation, found that tobogganing was the fourth-most risky sport for serious injuries, behind diving, parachuting and snowmobiling.
In the winter of 2010-11, there were 171 hospitalizations from tobogganing crashes with about one-third of them involving kids under the age of 10, according to the Canadian Institute for Health Information.
Tator adds, however, that kids can wear helmets to prevent injuries.
Erin Hope, director of Ripple Adventure, an adventure and sport company in Ottawa, says she’s pleased Ottawa isn’t following suit with the tobogganing bans.
“I don’t think it should be a tool to prevent people from getting out and having fun,” she says. “I think we should be getting out and having fun in a more safety conscious fashion.”