Two young boys have been hospitalized in upstate New York after falling from an inflatable bounce house which was caught up into the air by strong winds on Monday afternoon.
Three young children were playing in a bounce house in the South Glens Falls area Monday when a sudden gust of wind lifted them up into the air. A 10-year-old little girl was inside, along with two little boys who were five and six years old. The children were being supervised by their parents, and the 10 feet by 10 feet inflatable bounce house was said to have been properly staked to the ground by the neighbor who owned it.
The children were so light that the bounce house was able to lift off the ground with them inside of it - "It was like a horror movie," the little girl's sister said. ABC News reports that the girl was near the door of the bounce house and dropped to the ground as it took off into the air. Thankfully, she only suffered minor scrapes from her fall. "She [had] a couple of angels watching over her that day," her older sister told CBS Albany.
The estimated 25 miles-per-hour winds lifted the bounce house more than two stories high and carried it about 50 feet away before landing in a nearby school field. It is estimated that the two boys fell out of it from about 15 feet off the ground - one landed on the road and has two broken arms, while the other landed on a parked car and is hospitalized with a serious head injury.
"A big gust of wind just blew it right off the ground with the kids in it ... I don't think that people know that this can happen when it's windy," the girl's mother said. The Little Tikes manufacturing company is investigating what might have gone wrong - "Our thoughts and prayers are with the children and their families," they said in a statement to ABC News.
PopStar.com reports that there have been similar accidents involving bounce houses in recent years, many of which have ended in injury and even death.
