More Sledders Sliding Into Nation’s Emergency Rooms Doctors Blame Abundance Of Snow, Recklessness, Inner Tubes

Medical experts say they’re facing an epidemic of sledding injuries this year, as cemeteries, golf courses - even stairwells and stadiums - glisten temptingly in a coat of white.

During the last week, Children’s Hospital in Boston treated 22 children for sledding injuries. Ten were hospitalized, five in intensive care. Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh recently treated eight serious sledding injuries in a nine-day period. Philadelphia’s Children’s Hospital treated seven.

The hospitals don’t keep lists of sledding injuries from year to year, but doctors feel this season is definitely off to a worse start than usual.

“One child went through ice on a pond and drowned; we’ve seen some major trauma, some facial fractures,” said Dr. Gary Fleisher, chief of emergency medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital.

In Ohio, four women broke their backs in separate sledding accidents on “Suicide Hill” at Community Golf Course in Kettering the week before Christmas. Miami Valley Hospital treated them and four other people with back injuries from the hill, Dr. Mark Eilers said.

The hospital has seen a “constant parade” of serious and minor injuries from collisions as well. “You’ve got no airbags on those things,” he said.

From the Northeast to the Great Lakes, it has been an unusually snowy winter. Boston sees an average yearly snowfall of 43 inches. This year, 41 inches have fallen already.

More snow than usual means more sledders, Eilers said, and that means more recklessness. “You get this prowess,” he said. “‘I can go faster than you. I can go backwards. I can go standing up.”’

Fleisher said trouble also comes from the current fashion in sledding: inflatable snow tubes.

The round, pillow-like tubes will bounce over just about anything but are difficult to control.

“I think all of us who work in the emergency department have a sense that the greater number of injuries are related to the inflatable tubes,” Fleisher said.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission estimates that 33,000 people a year in the United States, more than half of them younger than 16, require emergency room treatment because of sledding accidents.