The Olds Aquatic Centre reopened to the public Friday afternoon after being shut down for almost a week due to tests that revealed a change in the water's chemical composition that could lead to bacteria growth.Director of community services Doug Wagstaff says according to staff, there was nothing in the water per se, but the high platelet counts meant the water was more “susceptible to the growth of bacteria.”As of Friday, staff still didn't know precisely what caused the elevated levels, but Wagstaff says the decision was made to reopen the pool because tests came back Friday morning indicating the water was safe for swimmers.He says it's suspected that the culprit was aging sand filters which were due to be replaced during next month's annual Aquatic Centre shutdown, which will take place from September 2-20.Wagstaff stresses next month's shutdown is not related in any way to this past week's problem – just a regularly scheduled maintenance period.He says staff test pool water on a weekly basis. If platelet levels come back high, then they “make changes to the water chemistry,” generally by increasing the amount of chlorine in the water.That was done after tests continued to reveal high levels, even after staff added extra chlorine.Chorine levels were then spiked even higher – to a point where it was unsafe to allow the public to use the pool; hence closure of the Aquatic Centre, which took effect on Monday. The pool remained closed until noon Friday, after samples came back indicating the water was now safe.“When those remain high over time, things can potentially grow in the water. So we needed to find the source of the problem to ensure it did not get to a point where something could seriously contaminate the pool,” Wagstaff says.“So that's why we closed the pool on Monday. On Monday, we increased the levels of chlorine to a point where we couldn't have patrons in the pool – what we call ‘shock' the pool to get it back to a (safe) level.”He says employees were so concerned to rectify the problem as soon as possible that they took their second set of samples down to the provincial lab in Calgary at 6:30 a.m.Wagstaff says Aquatic Centre staff were confident by Tuesday that they had taken the steps to solve the problem, but they had to wait until results came in Friday before they could reopen the facility.He says staff checked out everything they thought could have created or allowed the problem, including pool skimmers and filters. Everything checked out, including the skimmers.However, earlier, staff had noticed the filters weren't working as effectively as they had been, probably due to their age, so they were scheduled to be replaced during next month's shutdown.Staff suspect those filters are the source of the problem. So they jacked up the level of chorine running through them.“We ran chlorine through the sand, which isn't a regular part of the process,” Wagstaff says. “We went beyond what our normal process would be so that we could get it.”Although the pool filters are sand filters, Wagstaff says Aquatic Centre staff can't simply dump out the old sand and replace it with new sand – a specialized company has to come in and do that work. They were already scheduled to come in and do that during next month's shutdown, so staff plan to operate the pool until that shutdown occurs.The Albertan asked Wagstaff if the Aquatic Centre has ever experienced this problem before.“Not to the point where we've had to close. Normally if we increase those chlorine levels it immediately changes the water chemistry. But it wasn't, so we increased it to a level,” he says. “Normally we'd do that overnight and it would come back down. But because we were having them return that way, we went well beyond (normal procedures).”
