‘Like blast wounds’: children at risk from ride-on mowers, expert says

A Queensland child health expert says ride-on mowers should have far more safety features to prevent the devastating injuries they can cause to young children.

The tragic death of a child in NSW in a ride-on mower accident recently has brought the issue to the fore again.

The three-year-old boy died after being run over by the ride-on lawn mower driven by his father on the NSW far south coast last weekend.

Dr Sasaka Bandaranayake, a paediatric rehabilitation specialist with the Queensland Paediatric Rehabilitation Service, said even if children were not fatally injured, the types of injuries they suffered were still life altering.

“The blades on a ride-on mower are travelling at something like 240 to 320 kilometres per hour, about 3000 revolutions per minute,” she said.

“When that hits a child, it’s not a clean cut, it looks more like blast wounds: extensive soft tissue damage, crush fractures, compound fractures, burns – it’s horrendous.”

Six children under the age of eight needed lower-limb amputations at the Queensland Children’s Hospital as a result of ride-on mower incidents between July 2021 and April 2022.

That was a rise from previous reporting periods, which usually featured one or two such incidents, which Bandaranayake said was “weird” and caused her to issue a public warning.

Of those, two required below-the-knee amputations, two below the ankle, and two required partial foot amputations.

“Those types of injuries require prostheses for life,” she said.

The six children seriously injured by ride-on mowers were part of the more than 600 children injured by mowers of all kinds between July 2017 and June 2022, almost half of whom were under five years old, according to the Queensland Injury Surveillance Unit.

Ride-on mowers are a part of life for families in outer suburbs and regional areas, but Bandaranayake said there needs to be real action taken to minimise the risk to young children.

“The main thing is that children need to be taught that these mowers are a tool, not a toy,” she said.

“It’s often a fun thing to give children a ride on the mower, but they should not be associating them with fun – they should be kept well away.”

She said simple safety measures such as putting the reverse button at the back of the mower, requiring the driver to turn around, could help reduce injuries.

And she urged people more generally to keep their children inside when using the mowers, and to always look behind when reversing.

In addition to the blades, she said, the mowers could throw up rocks and other debris that could injure a child.

“There are a lot of things that happen that are freak accidents that you can’t do anything about, but this is something that we can do something about – every one of these injuries was avoidable,” she said.