A recent survey of playground inspection procedures used by California park and recreation agencies revealed a good-news, bad-news story to a UC Davis playground safety expert. "The good news is that more than 84 percent of the 183 respondents are using safety checklists when routinely inspecting their playgrounds, however most of those checklists don't follow national or state guidelines," says Seymour Gold, a professor of environmental planning, who helped draft playground safety legislation for the state of California. "Inspection checklists should be tailored to meet the needs of the specific park or playground, but they should always follow established guidelines that are based on scientific findings." Gold, who recently reported results of the survey in the journal California Parks and Recreation, suggests that more user-friendly checklists and systematic inspections by qualified safety professionals are the best way to prevent the 20 deaths and 200,000 serious injuries that occur annually on playgrounds throughout the nation. "Eventually, technology such as laptop computers and graphic inventory systems will be widely available for safety inspections, but at this time conventional checklists combined with frequent, routine inspections are the best defense against playground accidents."