That poor child… And those poor ems workers who had to dig out her little body…
I tagged along with my wife for a pool day at her friend’s house with our kids. I was swimming along near the wall of the pool when my foot was violently pulled into the vaccuum line. Really spooked me. It’s code for those suction lines to have a spring-loaded cover. This one didn’t. I luckily freed my foot and went to check the valves on the pump. All suction was routed to the vacuum line, none to skimmer.
Some expensive pumps have an anti-entrapment system but most do not.
I warned her to get that shit fixed ASAP…
For commercial pools of this scale, there’s just no chance to resist.
I own a pool now and I take all that shit very seriously. You don’t mess around with water.
I still have nightmares from being a kid in a pool and getting stuck with my face basically at the water line because of something like that.
Sorry, what the fuck. This is a complete failure on engineering controls and safety. A safety analysis on an industrial plant would find something like this to be a major safety vulnerability that needs several redundant safeguards.
Jesus fucking Christ.
Can you imagine being the inspector who missed this?
Reading a few articles. It sounds like this was inspected and passed before people got into the pool.
This is a “someone should go to jail” level of criminal negligence.
I work as a pool maintenance technician in Texas. There are laws that are pretty strict for public pools for anti-entrapment drains
From what I’ve been able to read and from what I’ve read from interviews, the pipe was like 6" wide and didn’t have a cover. I believe it was a wall return that she was sucked into. But it was plumbed backwards and so it was pulling water instead of pushing
I work with multiple river pumps and they’re frequently the biggest pumps in the pump room. So the water they return is at a pretty high flow rate and none of them have a cover on the pressure side. The ones I work with have multiple openings of an inch or two
But the main reason this happened was someone fucked up with plumbing the pump and used the discharge side for the pressure side. No idea how someone wouldn’t notice
I think I read that they didn’t disclose that they were renovating and adding a river. No idea why it wasn’t looked at either. So, so, so many levels of failure lead to this
Dunno if it changes anything, but user224 posted this link elsewhere in this discussion, and it says the pipe was 30cm (almost a foot) in diameter – I’m no expert, but the photos in this and OP’s article seem to show an opening about that size to me. I only mention it because that seemed uncommonly large to me.
That link is cancer
Corporations are psychopaths.
There was a story on this shit on 60 minutes in the 90s. Maybe chronicle. Idk. Stories about people having their intestines ripped out of their assholes.
Horrifying shit.
Apparently not a universally solved issue?
Yeah, I thought shit like this was far behind us and all settled, not a problem anymore, etc., what the fuck.
I was maybe 6 when I saw the same 60 minutes show. Terrified me. Mom got mad at dad for not noticing I was watching with horrified eyes beside the side of the couch.
Why didn’t the pipe have a screen over it?
If there was only one pipe or doesn’t really matter if there is a screen or not. If the pipe had a cover she would have still been stuck on the bottom and no one likely would have been able to get her out of the water. If a second pipe had been there the pressure wouldn’t have built up enough to suck her in.
Elsewhere I read the pump actually did have an entrapment system engaged and shut off, but by the time she blocked the pipe and sensors detected the obstruction, she was already wedged 20 feet into the pipe.
In other words, if this had a simple grate and she blocked it with her body, the pump would’ve shut off almost immediately.
The other problem is this hole was supposed to be an outlet, not an inlet. But the pump was reversed for whatever reason.
I work in the pool industry. From my understanding, she was sucked into a water return so there isn’t regulation requiring a cover
It’s like being sucked into the end of a fire hose, there isn’t a cover because it’s supposed to pushing water out so a cover wouldn’t help
If I remember right, the pool was recently renovated so I believe they plumbed it backwards. So the water was returning through a screen
When I managed a pool, I remember the Virginia Graeme Baker act being something I was told about pretty early on; it was a prevalent enough of a thing that sometimes trying to start up my spa’s motor wouldn’t provide a clear enough suction, and the motor would shut off for safety. A properly managed pool should never have had this risk.
So vacuum pipes are not required to have grates installed on them? If not for peoples safety than to at least prevent trash clogs
While there are significant regulations around intake pipes, including grates and/or having multiple intakes so that no single one can be completely obstructed to create a suction scenario where someone can be trapped, this particular pipe was found to be plumbed on the wrong side of the pump. It was sucking in water when it was supposed to be ejecting water.
This is serious for the hotel chain, franchisee, installer/contractor, and inspector. This had to fail so many checks to have occurred. It wasn’t a chance occurrence for someone to be sucked in and seriously harmed or killed with the way this was plumbed; it was a matter of time when someone was going to be seriously injured or killed.
Truly a tragedy, and I cannot for the life of me imagine the pain that family is going through right now.
Guts, by Chuck Palahniuk.
You’re welcome
That was a good (and gross) read haha. Didn’t realize it was the Fight Club author until after.
