Girl who drowned at waterpark 'unlawfully killed'

An 11-year-old girl who drowned at a waterpark was unlawfully killed, a coroner has found.

Kyra Hill died after getting into difficulty in a designated swimming area at Liquid Leisure near Windsor in Berkshire while attending a birthday party on 6 August 2022. Senior coroner Heidi Connor ruled there were gross breaches of health and safety measures at the park which contributed to her death.

The breaches related to the depth and visibility of the water and the absence of an emergency plan and risk assessment, she found. An inquest at Berkshire Coroner's Court heard how the schoolgirl was found more than an hour after emergency services were alerted and was taken to hospital, where she was pronounced dead.

The inquest heard there were no signs warning of deep water at the leisure park. Despite various sharp drops of up to 4.5m (14.7ft) within the swimming zone, the only signs relating to depth said "danger shallow water".

The lake where Kyra was seen going under was 2.68m (8.8ft) deep, a report carried out after the incident found. Liquid Leisure said in a statement after the inquest that the incident took place in the "designated swimming area of our lake, which always had a fully trained Royal Life Saving Society (RLSS) lifeguard on duty".

A 17-year-old lifeguard managed to reach the point where Kyra disappeared but staff at the centre were only qualified to perform "surface-water rescues" - not underwater ones. The inquest heard evidence of how there was a 10-minute gap between the first and second searches for the youngster in that part of the lake.

Although a manager attended rapidly, 37 minutes passed between Kyra struggling and 999 being called. The frantic search was likened to a "nightmare" by a mother attending the birthday party, while a police officer described it as a "chaotic scene" due to "conflicting" information being fed to the emergency crews.

The diver who eventually found Kyra told the inquest the lake had "almost zero visibility". Parents and carers were not advised to attend with children in a ratio of one to four, and young children were permitted to swim without buoyancy aids, the coroner said.

There was also no emergency plan or risk assessment that took those factors into account, and no control measures were identified and put in place to "take account of these clear risks.