Water safety: Drowning risk greatest in summer months

It was a common scene for a summer evening: Children playing in a backyard pool, parents chatting along the sides. Snow cones being made, plans being formed for the next year's basketball team.

But it took only an instant for the mood to shift from pleasure to panic.

And so it was on June 30 when Penelope Fox, 5, nearly drowned. Nearly. Because Penelope was lucky enough to have been noticed quickly. She was pulled from a backyard pool after being underwater less than a minute and she received CPR almost immediately, said her mother, Danni Fox.

"If that had to happen, which you hope it never does, that was the best-case scenario all-around," Danni Fox told the Deseret News.

Penelope was at a pool party for her older brother's basketball team in Bountiful and had been wearing a life jacket per her family's rules, when she decided to remove it to eat a snow cone on the patio. Her next decision, to leave the jacket off while she jumped off the diving board, not only put her life in jeopardy but continues to baffle her mother.

"It's really unusual that she would even think of getting in the water without it on," Fox said. "It was kind of freak."

When Penelope failed to get back in the diving board line, another parent wondered where she'd gone and looked for her before spotting her on the bottom of the pool. Someone pulled the child out while another called 911 and homeowner Mike Place performed CPR.

"By the time Davis County (emergency personnel) responded, she was starting to come back, but she was not yet out of the woods," Place said. "We were starting to get real close to where she was breathing on her own."

Fox said Penelope was conscious on the way to the hospital and knew what had happened, telling the ER nurse that she "drownded" and telling her mom she was "so sorry." She was out of the hospital and completely fine in a day and a half, eager to go on the family's annual trip to Pineview Reservoir, but her mother is keeping an increasingly watchful eye out.

"She isn't particularly different in the water, but I am absolutely paranoid," Fox said. "I don't even want people to talk to me. It's like, 'Shhh. I'm watching my kids.' "

Both Fox and Place spoke of the invaluable role of CPR in saving Penelope. Fox said that a family member who is a nurse is now setting up a class for all adults and teenagers in the family to learn that and other lifesaving skills.