Believe it or not, this article was published ten years ago, and we’re still worrying about this everso-easy-to-kill bug!

July 1998 a The following excepts from the upcoming PPOA Pumproom Press are written for professional swimming-pool operators, not for academicians or epidemiologists. They are intended to provoke serious thought and initiate serious action regarding the maintenance of sanitary and safe conditions in the public pools of this country.

Jumping, or should we say leaping, to sensational conclusions is the common modus of the American news media, creating “fact” in the observers’ minds from augmented circumstantial situations. The best example is the current, protracted hysteria in the water-park community regarding E.Coli. No doubt you’ve read our argument in the Pumproom Press Extra, Summer 98, asserting great statistical and logical improbability that contamination actually could have originated and/or sustained itself in the particular pool in question – or in any treated body of water, for that matter. We also hope you’ll concur that the collective reaction of the pool world is somewhat absurd.

Whether or not you agree that we should be draining pools then washing them with strong chlorine solutions, changing filter sand, or keeping superchlorinated pools under lock and quarantine for days on end in reaction to a fecal accident — or you think something well short of these extremes should be practiced — you nonetheless are wise to accept the obligation that some measure of responsible care and procedure must be exercised. The three most important measures, however, are pro-active; and when taken they should make much of the argument about what to do afterwards moot. At the very least, we should educate, facilitate, automate, then recreate.

First, let’s educate. We as an aquatic industry must help make our children and youth — even our adult patrons — become aware that the pool is neither the place to relieve oneself or to take a drink! Signs, handouts and other published advice to patrons and parents may help improve awareness, change habits, even develop new ones from infancy – all to assist the movement towards a worthy goal of heightened accountability for one’s own health. Responsible public education can, however, be offered without the news hysteria that scares folks away rather than modifies their behavior.

Beyond the plethora of oft-suggested and tiresome “rules”, to facilitate (equip) your facility with well-placed features and supplies helps even more — like providing multiple drinking-water fountains, easy-access restrooms kept super clean, convenient, attractive and more private showers, and great hand-washing stations. (See Handwashing Can Be Fun, elsewhere in this newsletter.) Even offering flushable moist wipes in toilets is a significant step well beyond the common and marginally effective budget toilet paper. (Yes, Kleenex and other companies now make them and, slowly, they are catching on as a major improvement in American personal hygiene for aware kids and big people…)
Signage can encourage or warn your patrons, as well. One sign at a waterpark states “Your infant must wear properly fitting waterproof diapers while in our sanitary pools – $1000 fine!” Another, affixed above the generally suggested list of sanitation rules for a pool, states “If you fail to follow the published or posted rules of this facility you may die.” Both extreme, yet both are reported to have been quite effective.

While hardware and signage improve the likelihood of proper conduct, nothing beats parental pre-school education about how to be sanitary in the toilet and about just where, specifically and exclusively, one should take a drink! It should be second nature not to ingest pool or water-feature water, yet that won’t be the case without a paradigm shift in parenting. “Don’t drink the pool water” should be an admonition just as common as “don’t drink the river water”, “don’t drink the dog’s water”, or “don’t drink from the puddle in the street!” Could this be the basis of a campaign?
The third in-advance suggestion should be obvious to PPOA members from waterparks and public pools alike, near certain to insure that no hazardous pathogen can lurk for even a handful of seconds in that sparkling recreational water you maintain.

To automate, however, means quite a bit more than hanging a machine on the wall that can read a value and turn on a pump. A fully automated facility is a system of devices, capabilities and actions resulting in the certainty that constant sanitation is maintained at all times in your aquatic facility. Quality ORP and pH automation and generously sized feed systems (see Controller Concepts, PrP 13) must be complimented by trained and diligent personnel assuring the equipment’s collective performance… then keeping fastidious records. Records, by hand or electronically archived, not only assure a pool owner’s liabilities are minimized but forces the operators to be constantly aware, constantly in touch with the equipment’s performance.

Choices here are critical too. The simple presence of an appropriate active-sanitizer residual must be maintained at all times, without a break, without exception, un-adulterated, no matter what! Presuming the presence of reliable automation, an appropriate target must be chosen. Courses have been written regarding water parameters, so let’s revisit just ORP for a second. We might presume that, while 650 mV of qualitative work value from our sanitizer is safe, 750 mV is a much better target. Vessels with very high organic load or those tending towards rapid dissipation, however, could use a value nearer 800 mV as the appropriate set level. You can set your low alarm at 700 mV, not 650, so you have some warning. The time-based failsafe or feed alarm will also warn you — call you on the telephone with the high-end models — when the feeders are struggling to keep up. (The action here is to fix the feed-rate problem; don’t just punch the timer reset!) Delays between alarms and action must, not should but must, be minimized. Alarms usually indicate not only that things are not so good but getting worse rapidly. Clearly, administrative procedures, equipment settings and notification options must be fine-tuned together to result in error-free automation.
Choose education, equipment, settings and procedures that will make all this happen and you’ll be way ahead of any bug that makes his way into your pool!

Make Hand Washing Fun!

An eye-catching fountain display on the World Waterpark Association’s trade-show floor generated a conversation about hand washing that could become big stuff. It was comprised of a fiberglass open-mouthed fish, positioned vertically as if jumping from a make-believe lake. Projecting from that mouth was a perfect, laminar-flow column of water which arched up, over and perfectly down through a small hole in a splash-dampening receptor serving as a sink. This set-up amounts to the most fun and interesting handwashing station this editor had ever seen! A bright light was positioned in the nozzle deep inside the “fish”, whose parallel light rays hid themselves within the shiny, half-inch tubular arch to be discovered only by the child who immerses her or his hands under the falling column above the “sink”. As the perfectly formed rod of water breaks up and energetically looses form, brilliant color radiates from both the hands and the droplets, making the experience of handwashing quite possibly the funnest thing at the pool!

Presuming you can restore your aquatic programs or the waterslides to their proper fun priority, a feature-full, unique and exciting handwashing station will nonetheless multiply the sanitary practice at your facility by ten!
Oh, yes, the stream of potable water can initiate when a child approaches the station, remaining on for seconds or minutes at the option of the pool owner.
Showers, how about showers? Well, the fountain company could come up with a breaching-whale fountain or a warm waterfall to make showering playful and fun as well, but we all know that the area needing the most flushing is least likely to be cleansed. Maybe access-ability, comfort and a renewed emphasis on privacy in the locker room might make real showering a bit more common and complete.

Contaminated Food for Thought

A well-known senior health official recently made an interesting point regarding pool closures: Where do we think the kids will swim on those days when we close our public pools? They’ll often go to nearby natural recreational waters, where the contamination is guaranteed to be high. The wide spot in the creek, the river, even the kiddie pond in the park run by the same recreation district that owns the pool… these all attract our hot and fun-hungry youth in the summer. When was the last time you heard of a lake being closed to swimming for a fecal accident? Have you ever compared the accepted maximum fecal coloform count for a lake to that of a pool?
At a November meeting of California aquatic managers, great concern was expressed over pool closures. One exasperated member cited in her case the children of the city of Chico go directly to their alternate swimming hole, an outfall of the notoriously dirty “Chico creek” which is open free to the community, and the cows, every single Summer. These pool closures, for arbitrary periods of time from a few hours to two or more days, drive the crowds straight to the park pond, lifeguards and all.
Curiously, the kids being “protected” from the remotest of remote possibilities at the pool seem nonetheless not to be infected by an environment ten thousand times more risky.

Another recently contributed thought: Are you drinking the water from your kitchen tap? In nearly every community in the country, swimming-pool sanitizer requirements are significantly more stringent than those for the water we drink. In this editor’s community, the local water plant is required to have .2 ppm chlorine at the output to distribution (and that residual is intentionally chloramine) yet the pool at the high-school a block away is required to have 1.5 ppm free chlorine. Not only is that comparison inconsistent, but the source for the water to the plant is surface run-off from grazing lands and 50 miles of open irrigation ditches, while the pool’s source is the “treated-and-sanitary” product of that very water plant!

While we’re worrying about one-in-ten-billion likelihoods, shouldn’t we make something more of preventing the hundreds of annual drownings and shallow-water-entry spinal injuries? This editor thinks so.

(Copyright 1998, Professional Pool Operators of America. Permission to copy and distribute, in its entirety only, is granted. For information regarding this material, earlier articles on E.Coli and Cryptosporidium, or about the non-profit organization PPOA, contact Kent Williams, 916 663-1265.)