Inflatable bounce houses have become a staple at birthday parties and other celebrations around the world. It doesn't take much wind for them to be blown over though. Since 2000, there have been at least 136 wind-related bounce house incidents worldwide, resulting in 489 injuries and 28 deaths. Perhaps just as surprising, many states in the U.S. have inadequate or no regulations regarding bounce house safety.
How much wind does it take to blow over a bounce house? What weather events are causing these incidents? How can we make bounce houses more wind-resistant and what can you do to help ensure your children stay safe? Dr. John Knox from the University of Georgia joined the podcast this week to answer these questions and share more of his research on this unique topic.
More information about bounce house safety
- Read the research: Wind-Related Bounce House Incidents in Meteorological, Regulatory, and Outreach Contexts
- Weathertobounce.com website: Information on past incidents, policy information, and safety recommendations for your next bounce house rental.
Episode preview
About the Across the Sky podcast. The weekly weather podcast is hosted on a rotation by the Lee Weather team: Matt Holiner of Lee Enterprises' Midwest group in Chicago, Kirsten Lang of the Tulsa World in Oklahoma, Joe Martucci of the Press of Atlantic City, N.J., and Sean Sublette of the Richmond Times-Dispatch in Virginia.
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About the Across the Sky podcast
The weekly weather podcast is hosted on a rotation by the Lee Weather team:
Matt Holiner of Lee Enterprises' Midwest group in Chicago, Kirsten Lang of the Tulsa World in Oklahoma, Joe Martucci of the Press of Atlantic City, N.J., and Sean Sublette of the Richmond Times-Dispatch in Virginia.
Episode transcript
Note: The following transcript was created by Adobe Premiere and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies as it was generated automatically:
Welcome, everybody to the Across the Sky podcast, our Lee Enterprises National Weather Podcast. I'm Joe Martucci based in New Jersey. Along with me this week, meteorologist Sean Sublette over in Richmond, Virginia, and Matt Holiner in Chicagoland. Here we are talking about bounce houses and the weather. Bounce houses were first invented in 1958. I think all of us here on the podcast have been in a bounce house.
You've probably been in a bounce house before, but there are some weather concerns with bounce houses. In fact, somebody in a whole research study on this wind related bounce house incidents, it's not just that one viral video you see on TikTok or Instagram of a bounce house flying in the air like it's a cow in the tornado and one of those bad weather movies.
It is a is a real deal here. There have been 209 injuries in the United States from 2000 to 2021, from bounce houses in relation to the weather actually knocking over to bounce house or causing it to fly around. And three fatalities, unfortunately. So for this episode of the Across the Sky podcast, we are talking with the lead researcher of this project, John Knox.
He's coming up right now. And we are really happy to have on John Knox to talk to us all about the bounce houses in the wind, in the weather, a very relatable podcast. I think it's going to be John is a Josiah MIT Megs excuse me distinguished teaching professor of geography and undergraduate coordinator of the Atmospheric Sciences Program at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia, where he's been on the faculty since 2001.
John has authored over 65 peer reviewed research and education articles, is also the coauthor of the award winning Introductory College level Textbook Meteorology Understanding of the Atmosphere. He is a fellow of the American Meteorological Society. That is a big deal for everybody listening, and he has many former and current students, including ABC News chief meteorologist Ginger Zee, Colorado State University, atmospheric sciences professor and Jeopardy!
Tournament of Champions winner Rush Schumacher. And more. So John, thanks for joining the podcast here. We really appreciate it. Yeah, thanks for inviting me. Yeah, no, absolutely. And we know you're also housed in the the same building as one of our complimentary podcast, the Weather Geeks podcast hosted by Marshall Shepherd. So we appreciate you taking some time away from Marshall and we'll be with us.
Thanks so much. Yeah, well, I'll be teaching with him in just a little bit over an hour. Awesome. Now we love Marshall. He's done a lot for the field of meteorology and we are we're fans of his podcast as well. We'll talk about your your research study I was saying is off camera. I was reading the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society Monthly magazine, which if you're in the weather world, it's kind of like our our weekly or monthly guide to what's going on in weather in terms of research and who's doing what.
And I came across your article and I really enjoyed it. I thought it'd be a good podcast topic. It's called Wind Related Bounce House Incidents in Meteorological Regulatory and outreach context. It's about bounce houses. I mean, who doesn't love bounce houses? You know, my if birthday party you jumping on a bounce house you know you're hanging out in the summer day but you know, kind of talking about some of these dangers associated with it when it comes to the weather and also some of the legality around it, too, and what different states are doing.
So I just thought it was really fascinating. So I want to ask you what got you into talking about bounce houses? It was literally a Facebook joke in the beginning. A colleague of mine who I never met at that point, you know, just Facebook friends named Tom Gill at the University of Texas, El Paso was posting one day about dust devils because they have dust devils out in El Paso that had lifted up a bounce house, actually brought it up off the ground and thrown it through the air.
And he was posting about this because he does aerosol research and he just said, well, you know, Bounce House is just a really big aerosol particle, right? Like a dust particles just bigger. And I jokingly said, well, shoot, we ought to do a paper on this. It's I study the wind. I'm an atmospheric dynamics. And Tom does aerosol research.
It seemed like a perfect combination. And then a couple of beats went by and then I private messaged him and I said, Tom, you know, that's maybe isn't the worst idea because nobody really had ever thought about the risks from wind related bounce houses, accidents, except when they make the news. Right. But from a research standpoint, there was there was nothing on it.
And so then the questions were, how often does this happen? And once we started looking, they happen much more frequently than we thought. And so we decided to do research on it, including actually two generations of students here at the University of Georgia. One, they kind of started the research and then another group that helped finish it over time to where we were looking at these not just in the United States, but internationally, looked at what caused them.
And as our group grew, they were they were asking policy related questions such as, you know, what are the what are the regulations? What do you have to do to have one of these things operating in your yard or at a carnival or something? And how does that differ in various states? Yeah, it snowballed. Basically. It went from one of those things like, ha ha.
And then office like, that's not such a bad idea after all. Which kind of parallels the way science works, right? They say it's the aha moments are that, gee, that's odd. In our case it was the ha ha that went to the Aha. Yeah. What was pretty alarming to me when I was looking at your article was just how many cases.
I mean I've seen videos of these have these bounce houses interacting with wind before, but I never realized how many times this has actually happened in just 20 years. The period that you all looked at this, it was pretty alarming how how frequently this occurred. So I'm curious, when you were looking at these cases, what were the wind speeds that were occurring when you had these incidents that led to injuries and deaths?
The wind speeds were usually lower than you would expect, but with a caveat. Very few people are actually standing next to a bounce house with an anemometer measuring the wind speed when it blows. So what you have to do is you rely on the the nearest neighbor, basically the closest weather observation. And in those cases, it really depends.
For example, I mentioned a dust devil. One way that these bounce houses go into the air, you can have a dust devil down the street with a wind of 40 miles an hour. Inside, it's a little swirl and the wind may be calm where you're at. So it's tough to get an exact number. But the numbers we found were frequently under the regulation levels for operating belts, houses.
And that's because even in cases where the the winds are more what we call synoptic scale, larger scale, not just a dust devil, what will happen is that you'll have gusts or the forecast will be for winds, but they get gust here in the afternoon as we often see. And people just don't really realize when they're operating these things how easy it is for these High-Profile belts houses to go airborne or at least to get tumbled over.
How come they haven't been required to be tied down in the first place? I mean, it would seem to me like you've got some effectively a balloon that's just sitting on the ground and you've got, you know, maybe these small 40 or £50 projectiles bouncing up and down inside of it. What do you do? You even know what some of the codes were for this?
Oh, yeah. Yeah. We did a deep dive into the regulations. They vary on a state to state basis. There's no federal regulation, which ultimately regulation isn't always a good word. But yes, if you're hurt by something and it varies from state to state, you would like to see, you know, federal regulation on that. But yeah, even in our research, what we found was it was really kind of hodgepodge.
17 states at the time of our article didn't have any guidelines for bounce houses or actually excluded them specifically in regulations. They had to do with like amusement rides and things like that. 19 states, on the other hand, explicitly cited the what's the kind of the the the gold standard, which is the American Society for Testing and Materials standards, which do set limits on the wind speed in which inflatables should be used and have all kinds of requirements.
But one of the problems with that is that those regulations specify winds of like you don't operate in more than 25 mile an hour winds. And we found some cases where nobody's going to know that the winds are going to be above 25 miles an hour. For example, I mentioned a dust devil or a case where the weather the weather forecast is for winds 10 to 20 and it gets a little gusty more than that in the afternoon due to daytime mixing.
So, number one, we have a problem where states don't have regulations. Number two, we have states that have sometimes because of high visibility accidents, have put in regulations and they use the the standards that they should be using to regulate them. But number three, Mother Nature finds a way to tamp these things over or blossom into the air, even when the your official weather forecasts wouldn't necessarily say that the winds are at the levels expected.
So it's kind of complicated. And, you know, if you go to your your your research here, there's a map of the United States and you break it down by level of law and laws or no laws, what states have these, you know, inflatable guidelines. So I see three states here to have no guidelines. It's Idaho, Wyoming and Alabama, your home state.
What's that? Oh, yeah. And you're my home state. Yes. So I'm going to ask you two questions and I kind of relate to what you just said. So, one, we only see two deaths in those states, right? So between Idaho, Wyoming and Alabama, only two. Is it just because the population is not as high there? Is there something else to it?
And then secondly, did you bring this up with any lawmakers about what was going on? Great questions. So it's hard because there aren't that many events to say, oh, these states don't have regulations, therefore people are are dying. Sometimes it goes the other way around where you had an incident with several injuries and then the state did get proactive.
You know, people complained and then the state put in regulations. And so it's kind of hard to draw a 1 to 1 on that. But what we wanted to do was to collect this information so that people can be aware, the public can be aware of what the regulations should be, how even that's not everything that you need to do.
You need to still be vigilant as a parent or your church carnival operator or whatever to make sure you're following the guidelines, but also to be weather aware because you can have really small scale weather events blow up that can cause a problem, whether it's thunderstorm outflow or winds on a nice day. But it's it's windy after a cold front.
You've got some, you know, convective mixing dry convective mixing bring higher winds down. That's as far as we went. We haven't, you know, started our political campaign to do a national regulations. But what we did want to do was get enough information out there to the public, not just through a journal article, but through our own website. Weather to balance dot com where people can find out not only our our information that's in the paper, but a completely listing of all the accidents that have happened and the causes of them because there are multiple meteorological causes that usually are sneaky because it's like it's nice weather, it's just that the wind comes up for some
reason. I could see you winning a lecture at an election. You know, with this corn, you can run on the Bounce House campaign. I think it's pretty bipartisan, right? I think I would like to think that, but probably the anti-regulatory crowd would get me on this one. Well, and John, yeah, there's so many different angles. You can look at this.
And I'm curious, you know, with so many things that could be looked at during this research, I'm curious if you looked at when you had these injuries and deaths, were the these wind related incidents, did they have any impact on the number of people that were in the bounce house at the time? Because I imagine if there were more people in the bounce house that would weigh it down a little bit more and maybe it would be less likely that it would tip over in high winds versus maybe just having one or two little kids in there.
It's more likely that it could be picked up by the wind. Did you look at all out of the number of people that were in these bounce houses when they were tipped over or lost it in the air? We weren't able to do that because nobody's counting. I really don't think any anybody standing at the door saying, Oh, there's 13 people, there's four, there's six.
And also you'd have to do the wait. That sounds like a great experimental kind of thing to do in a in a laboratory or a wind tunnel. We can we can go to our friends in South Carolina at Ivy House maybe, and get them to do it. So unfortunately, we didn't have that information, but it isn't just ones and twos because the worst event ever for a wind related bounce house and that was in Tasmania as we were wrapping up this paper on the 16th of December and 2021, they were having an end of school event in Devonport, Tasmania.
It was the end of school in December because of course the seasons are different, so it was getting out for the summer and this basically a middle school was having a an end of school party and they had a bounce house and Tasmania is just off the coast of Australia and so they were kind of near the water and everything and some kind of wind event happened and this is in litigation as far as I understand, still in Australia, but some kind of really small scale wind event came up that lofted that bounce house with a bunch of kids, a bunch of kids, not just one or two, about 30 feet in the air, and
the kids fell out and six children died. And this was international news. This made The New York Times made everywhere. And so it showed that although in the beginning you think this is funny about us flying in the air, it really is a health threat. And it's not just ones and twos because there were six children that died, but there were others.
I'm not sure I saw an exact count, but there were probably ten or 12 children in it. And so, no, that didn't keep it from going airborne. Wow. All right. Well, lots of information here to digest. We're going to have more on the other side of this. You're listening to the process. We are back with the Across the Sky podcast.
New episodes come out every Monday, wherever you get your podcasts or on your favorite newsroom website. We are here with John Knox. He is a professor at the University of Georgia who did a research project all about bounce houses and the incidents caused by different types of weather. Very interesting here. We're going to pass it over to Matt, who has another question for John.
So, Matt, take it away. John, I was curious just how you tracked down these 132 cases of wind related incidents from 2000 to 2021, like how did you uncover these? Because I imagine especially early 2000 went before social media. It was harder to know about these events and the fact that you did this on an international scale. It wasn't just in the US.
So how did you track down these 132 cases? This was a case of how a research project just kept growing because we wanted to know first of all about the ones that we had seen. Some of the high profile cases have happened in Oceanside, New York, or in southeast Florida. But as we started searching, well, of course, what we did was we started Googling and we saw all these cases that were from outside the United States.
And so we just kept expanding our search. And ultimately we were doing regular Google searches on dozens and dozens of keywords. And we even tried to do it in different languages if we could, or at least Spanish and we just kept getting more and more of these cases. China has had a bunch of them. And sometimes you'll find video from events from China as well.
So we thought, Well, why stop with the United States? That's kind of ethnocentric, because it does seem like this is an international phenomenon. And in fact, some of the worst cases have happened, as we would say, overseas. Yeah, unfortunately, I'm looking at the stats you have here. There were more fatalities in China, in Australia than the United States.
China had ten, Australia had seven. United States. Its rate here, you know, were you able to dive into the whether causes at all, like even in generalities for these other countries And what did you find there? Yes, and this was the case we're doing Meteorology in the 21st century is far preferable to the 20th century, because these days, not only can you Google the news and find things from anywhere in the world, it seems, but also we were surprisingly impressed with the amount of weather data that you can acquire internationally.
So we found numerous sites that would allow us to zoom in on surface weather maps, not just for the U.S. as we're used to, but Asia, Australia, Europe, South Africa. And so we were able to get pretty definitive answers for a lot of the cases. You know, a majority of the cases we felt we had the right answer.
And we went through a rigorous process of doing that. We had to really three different groups within our our research team independently analyze these cases. So we would look for a given event in, say, China. We would look at the surface weather map satellite if we could get it radar, if we could get it surface weather observations, and we would independently decide on which of the causes we thought it was, which could range anywhere from post cold frontal or thunderstorms or dust levels, as I've mentioned, or sea breeze related things or other things that are on the small scale to, you know, pretty much anything waterspouts.
We found one with a hurricane and please do not go into the bounce house during a hurricane. Right. It's not safe. But anyway, so we had our list of potential causes and we would independently decide based on the data that we saw for what we got and if we could come to a determination, we were okay with that, too.
And so we ended up with a chunk that were still unknown, but we thought that was pretty good for trying to do a global climatology, as it were, of these wind related bounce house accidents. Well, back to that point, how how forecast able are some of these very, you know, micro-scale events. I mean, we kind of understand the conditions that would lead to dust devils in terms of what's the surface made out of what is the boundary layer made out?
You know, what's the boundary layer conditions? But, you know, to the to the end, you use a general public, they have no inkling what the boundary layer is, and they don't care if it's if it's a dry, you know, a dry surface, that that's not something that's in their head. So how predictable do you think some of this stuff is?
I mean, obviously, thunderstorm outflow, hurricanes, sea breezes, those are kind of obvious to us. But what other kinds of things might might be missing? I think what we're missing, of course, is the same thing that weather forecasting is is missing even to this day, which is, as you said, the forecasting on very short time in space skills. And so some of that is still to be predicted in the future.
Maybe there is a future where we can predict some of those things. In the meantime, though, for safety, that just means that people have to be more vigilant than they are. Studies have been done on belts, houses for other kinds of injuries, not wind related, but kids basically bouncing out of the house and breaking their arms and things like that.
And the percentage of times that this happens when the adults aren't supervising is really hot. It's pretty close to 50%. And so this is our way of getting using the high profile events that make it onto the TV news where the bounce house is flying in the sky and any parent that sees that their heart goes, you know, somebody thump on it, it we're trying to raise awareness that they need to be careful because if they're standing at the bounce house and the gust front comes close and the winds start picking up, then even if there's not a forecast, there's no gust front warning or whatever, they're able to get the kids out because they
are aware that wind is a risk. These things can go airborne. And somebody told them, you know, they better be vigilant about it. Yeah. And kind of going off of that and looking at more solutions, obviously, that's the first one. If you see the winds picking up, get everybody out as quickly as possible. But when you were looking at is there any way to better secure these bounce houses so that they're less likely that if the wind hits and the kids are still in there, they're less likely to tip over or fly off it?
Can they be secured better? Yes. And so the ASTM standards talk about securing bounce houses. A lot of times we are suspicious of of some of these reports where we think that they weren't secured enough, that they weren't following the standards that are even printed on the bounce house. It says this is how you're supposed to secure them with sand bags and stakes.
And so forth. So I think that there's a lot of improvement that can be done on that. And again, that's public awareness. If people are aware that you don't just inflate this thing, set it out in the yard and everything's fine and you can go inside and, you know, do something else while the kids are playing, then I think we can really cut down on this.
And I should say for anybody that's thinking, well, you know, that doesn't sound like a lot of deaths and 132 events over 20 years, that's not that much. We're also trying to promote safety. That's beyond weather safety, because every year just in the United States, there are about 10,000 emergency room visits due to injuries from bounce houses that aren't weather related.
But because kids break fingers, bones, whatever, bouncing them, they're actually as dangerous as trampolines. And those of us of a certain era remember when trampolines were really in and then they weren't so in because people started like breaking their backs and things. But bounce houses are viewed as being safe for some reason. You know, they they look nice and squishy, but kids are breaking their arms like crazy.
Are you? No apologies to the bounce house people, but if parents are more vigilant, then we can cut down not just the one or two or three or six events that might happen in a year, but also thousands and thousands of emergency room visits that parents and kids still have to undergo. So we're also trying to promote safety beyond weather safety.
You're getting into what was going to be. My next question is, did you see anything with weather in trampolines? I know trampolines are heavier, but they have you know, they have something there. And then also, did you actually test out any of these bounce houses for your research? Was a part of your research? Yes, we did. I'll start with that.
First, we taught a research class for undergrads here at the University of Georgia. We do a team approach to our research and we actually read about houses twice and we bounced in them to see what would happen. And one of the things we noticed was even though it was secured properly and there wasn't much when it was just students bouncing around which are heavier than kids, we could watch the the stake in the sandbag.
Everything kind of start to move a little bit and it's like, yeah, this might take a little more effort to secure than than we thought. So yes, we did try them out. We didn't get a huge fan and blow them over. That was my great hope. But we didn't we couldn't do that. And probably liability. They're undoubtedly a liability.
We don't want our students to go flying in the air in the course of science. So we did try that out and let's go back to the other question on our dance about trampolines and trampolines. Well, as we've been studying bounce houses, Tom Gill and I and others have been trading more and more images of things that go blowing in the wind.
And so while we didn't encounter too much about trampolines, there's one fantastic video from Colorado of air mattresses. There were dozens and dozens and dozens of air mattresses out for some event. And the wind came up in Colorado, probably some kind of gust front and the air mattresses just that. It was like cattle, you know, stampeding, but but in an elegant way and over and over in.
And so, yeah, we've been trading videos and things like that. Fortunately, no people were hurt by the the stampede of the air mattresses. Yeah. And then, John, before we wrap up, I imagine there are probably some parents that are listening to this thinking now. Oh, boy. One more thing. I have to worry about the bounce house and my kid's birthday party blowing over, being blown in the wind.
So I'm wondering, for parents, is there a way when you're trying to pick a company that you're going to rent a house from, is there a way or are there some qualifications? Again, maybe there's not any kind of any way they kind of get a heads up like these people are going to properly tie this thing down. So it will at least be less likely that it gets blown away.
Like how can parents research that and maybe find one that's safer ASAP or bounce house and maybe a safer company that rents these bounce houses? And I'll I'll be clear about this. I think the companies with our experience because we had firsthand experience renting them here in Athens, the companies aren't necessarily the problem here. It's the follow through in terms of safety.
And so what I would say is if parents are interested, we've got our one stop shop kind of website, whether it's about Starcom WEAA, thert0bounc ecom. And that's where you can find not just information on these incidents and where they've happened, but also the statutes and regulations per state. And so you find out what your state supposed to be doing.
And then we also have safety information. So we have tips that are downloadable about the setting up of bounce houses. And so I think that that's where I would send people because I don't know of any other place where you can get that combination of, you know, where do they happen, what am I supposed to do? And then I think that parents could just compare the information they're getting from a company to what we say.
And so if if, if they're for some reason not following the regulations a company, then the parents would know. But again, I think in the end it's going to be a situation where one of the best things that can be done is for the parents to be weather aware, understand that events can happen that aren't even forecast. We don't really get a lot of dust devil forecasts, for example, and just act with caution but still have fun.
It's okay. I'm not the no fun guy. I understand. We're trying to keep people safe. You can have fun and you can keep people safe. You know, it's it's it all goes in conjunction. Now I'm looking at your website here. You actually there actually was a bounce houses that were I cover in New Jersey in Lakewood, New Jersey.
That was your most recent one. I actually wasn't even aware of it. But you said it was caused by a sea breeze. We'd be interested in learning a little bit more about that. But before we, we, we go, we just want to say thank you, John, for coming on and speaking with us about this and bounce houses. We hope, you know, everybody who's listening here was able to take something about this.
And, you know, there is some, you know, bounce houses are fun, but we want to make sure we're safe and you're definitely raising awareness of that. So on behalf of the whole podcast team, we really appreciate you coming on. Well, thank you. And I want to give a shout out to all my collaborators, Jada Smith, who is an undergrad student here now successfully graduated and gainfully employed, did a huge amount of work on the website.
And Castle Williamsburg also did a whole lot of work. You know, forget other people as well. But I wanted to I wanted to acknowledge it was a group effort amongst different generations of students here in Georgia as well as Thomas. Yeah, absolutely right. John, thanks again for the time. We appreciate it. Thanks for having you. I said this in the beginning when we interviewed John.
I'll say it again, I love this topic because it's something we can all relate to. It's also something we can pretty easily mitigate, you know, in terms of just being more safe with bounce houses and also just goes to show you don't need that much wind to knock it over, topple it over, or have it sent flying here and causing problems.
So really great study by by John and he said Tom Gill, his partner who did they decided to do research on for this. Yeah I'm still struggling to wrap my mind about I was just the first thing that stood out to me when I read his research was just the numbers associated with it. I just did not realize it was this common.
But you think of how common these things are. There's so many birthday parties going on and we do have a lot of high wind that there are a lot of thunderstorms. And that's the thing. You know, we don't even need a severe thunderstorm warning. That's where 60 mile per hour winds. But as John was mentioning, I mean, we're talking about winds with these that weren't necessarily with severe thunderstorm warnings, those 60 mile per hour winds, we're talking about more in that 40 mile per hour range.
So you wouldn't even get warned about this necessarily. You can just have 40 mile per hour winds in a regular thunderstorm. You think about how many birthday parties with bounce houses and how many thunderstorm there are, and then you start to think, oh, yeah, this could happen a lot more. And you think about how people get injured. You don't even necessarily need to be in the bounce house to get injured.
That bounce house falls over. Somebody's standing right next to it could be injured. So it's people just near the bounce houses can be injured as well. So this is just this like blew my mind. The thinking about how many people could be injured by these things. And that's not even talking about people just get injured using them. Like you put a bunch of kids in a bounce house, especially if you go over the the recommended number of people, the capacity of that bounce house people are just going to get injured that way.
So things are a little bit hazardous. I haven't been one in years. I remember it being fun. But you do have to watch out and not only watch the kids to make sure not too many get in there, but stay weather aware. If you feel those winds picking up. I think it's a good idea to get the kids out and take a little break.
You know, I've been in bounce houses as a child in the seventies and as a dad with a son in the in the aughts in the early teens and as a grown up, I could tell you it's a lot easier to get injured bouncing around there because you don't know where those kids are going. So that that's a risk.
Great. But, you know, back to the weather issue, sometimes it's it's obvious, right? I mean, if it's generally a windy day to begin with, you've got to kind of think through this. But in his research, it showed things like a sea breeze or a dust devil. Now we know those things occur, but the precision to forecast those things is not very high.
I mean, we can kind of say, oh, there's a sea breeze that might come in a little bit later, but whether that sea breezes five, ten, 20 miles an hour, two or 3 hours from now, that's tough to forecast. And you're not going to be able to forecast a dust devil. We are. We're a long, long way away from doing that.
So I think that's one of the the keys here is sometimes it is kind of intuitive, I think. And we maybe we shouldn't put this thing up today. Other times it's like, wow, I really had not expected that teeny tiny gust to just show up. Yeah. Agreed. You know, I think to Sean maybe we need an across the sky bounce house for us.
Maybe we should do a podcast and a bounce house. It's funny we mention this because in the podcast he brought up I guess there in South Carolina where they, they had this massive wind tunnel where they they build houses and they test them against the wind. And ironically enough, I did a story on that just a couple weeks ago.
I sat down with the Angel Marco about that. So we should put them in touch with one another so we can get really cool video of bounce houses blowing around safely, safely where nobody is hurt. So we need to put them in touch with one another. Yeah, because I think this is a combination of a couple of things.
One, figuring out ways to maybe better tie these things down, the proper ways to more accurately secure them so they're less likely to blown over. Maybe also you get into the people that and boy, that'll be an interesting topic Who designs is bounce houses and the shapes of these things. Is there a way you could design a bounce house made with a lower profile that is safer and less likely to be blown over because of the shape or the design of this thing?
So these people that design the bounce houses, I wonder if there be they would like to get in on this research too, and maybe design something safer. I mean, the people that actually tie them down, the companies that rent these things out, better way to secure them. So it's a couple of things that can be looked at. I hope there's more research is done here.
I think John has laid the groundwork for more research because this is literally a bigger issue than you think. I might be changing the world. We will see. But in all seriousness, do appreciate John coming on. I hope you all enjoyed listening to this as well. Remember, if you have listener questions, you can shoot us an email, a podcast, at least net and we will be happy to answer them.
We as we go forward in the next couple of weeks, we'll be talking about more fall stuff as the leaves slow. We begin to turn here in September, but I'll be getting there as you go into October. November 12. More podcast topics for you in the weeks to come. Make sure to subscribe to Across the Sky Podcast wherever you get your podcast, and we'll have a new episode for you next Monday.