How is playground softfall specified?

Playground surfacing is one of those elements that looks like landscaping and behaves like engineering.

Its job is to reduce the severity of head injury when a child falls, and its performance is measured rather than assumed. That single fact governs how it is specified, installed and inspected.

Fall height sets the surface

The controlling input is the free height of fall, which is the greatest distance a child can fall from the equipment to the surface below.

The surface then has to achieve a tested impact attenuation performance for that height. Higher equipment demands more capable surfacing, which in practice means a different material or a greater installed depth.

This is why softfall depth cannot be reduced to suit a budget or a levels problem. A depth that is adequate under a low platform is inadequate under a taller one, and the shortfall is invisible until someone falls.

Loose fill versus bonded systems

Loose-fill materials such as bark or sand attenuate well when correctly installed at depth. Their weakness is that they migrate. Children push them out of the impact zone, particularly under swings and at slide exits, and the depth quietly reduces at exactly the points where it matters most.

They therefore need containment and ongoing top-up, and a maintenance regime that someone has to actually run.

Bonded and synthetic systems hold their depth and offer a firm, accessible surface, which matters where the playground has to be usable by children with mobility aids. They cost more initially and depend heavily on the quality of the base beneath them.

Neither is universally correct. The choice follows the equipment, the site and who maintains it.

Protecting what is already there

Playground and landscape work usually happens among established assets, and the most valuable of those are frequently trees.

Tree protection is not a fence. It is keeping construction traffic, material storage and excavation out of the root zone, because compaction and root severance kill trees slowly enough that the damage is attributed to something else years later.

Existing services, drainage, fencing and adjacent structures need the same discipline. On a school or park site the asset protection plan is often the difference between a completed project and a completed project plus a replacement tree.

The delivered work

Monument's playgrounds and landscape capability covers playgrounds, landscape, softfall, vegetation and asset protection, with the Edgeware School Whole-of-School Landscape as the marquee project and works at Avon Dam for Sydney Water Catchment Authority in the same stream.

Playground work at a school carries the additional constraint that the surrounding site stays in use. The work zone has to be sealed from children who are, by definition, drawn to it, and the area has to be safe every afternoon under the same term-time discipline the rest of the site runs on.