In the wake of Hurricane Ian, Eric talks about how to clean up and recover a swimming pool after a Hurricane. Since pools are a low priority compared to home damage and destruction of the power grid, roads, etc., we recognize this is a sensitive topic when people can lose everything to the storm. The raw destructive power of a Hurricane needs to be both respected and expected.
00:00 - Intro
03:08 - Let's start with pool damage, electrical and physical
05:26 - Electrical Hazards
06:31 - Contamination, physical and chemical
07:48 - Biohazards
09:20 - How to clean up a pool after a Hurricane
11:59 - Chemistry and chlorination after circulation is up and running
14:21 - Brief summary
16:44 - Drinking water contamination
17:42 - Summary. Thanks for listening!
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87. Recovering a Swimming Pool After a Hurricane
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[00:00:00] Eric Knight: Hi everybody and welcome back to the Rule Your Pool podcast. I'm your host, Eric Knight. This is episode 87, and today we're going to talk about a topic that years ago we thought we would cover at Orenda. And it's a sensitive one because you cannot make light of something like a hurricane. I want to be very clear that this episode today is meant to be informative on how to recover after a hurricane. People are losing their entire livelihoods with these things. Or their lives in general, or their pets. Their entire homes, businesses crushed and destroyed by Mother nature. And we need to be respectful of that. We need to be respectful of what nature can actually do.
[00:00:44] And we just witnessed it again with Hurricane Ian. So years ago we were going to talk about this at Orenda, but we decided to pull it back. We said, No, it, it would be helpful, but now is not the time. We'll do this in the off season. And we just never got around to it because if it's not hurricane season, it's not really top of mind.
[00:01:06] And this storm seemed to be different, and I'm going to tell you why. Hurricane Ian just leveled a place that I was three weeks ago. Just came into Fort Myers. I was just down there teaching a class. Hard to believe. And I saw some aerial photos of where I was. It is unrecognizable. And yes, the coastal areas are going to have the most damage. I hope everybody got out. Of course, there were some lives taken from people who stayed.
[00:01:37] But in this episode, I want to be walking that line of being sensitive to that fact and also informative so that for everybody in the surrounding areas, that doesn't get completely wiped out. Of course, you're going to have a lot of stuff in your pools. And your homeowners are going to have a lot of debris and everything else that gets in it, and the home will still be standing just fine.
[00:02:00] Because generally speaking, the construction practices in Florida nowadays are made for hurricanes. So this episode is about how to recover a swimming pool after a hurricane. That is if it wasn't just completely wiped out, and by the way before going, we know that this is not a high priority compared to like a lost home or getting the infrastructure back up and fixing the roads and the power grid and clean, safe drinking water. We get it. Swimming pools are a luxury. Totally understand. But in the areas where you can clean it up, the sooner that you can clean it up, the easier it's going to be to clean up. Because the longer you let water sit stagnant with all sorts of contamination in it, the more of a biohazard it becomes.
[00:02:50] I'm recording this two days after Ian hit. This will probably get published a week or two after just because of our content schedule. But we hope you find value in it. So without further ado, this is episode 87 of The Rule Your Pool podcast. How to Recover a swimming pool after a hurricane.
[00:03:08] I think it would make sense to start with understanding what a hurricane can actually do to a pool. You basically have things that get into the pool and things that damage the pool.
Pool damage
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[00:03:41] Eric Knight: So let's start with things that damage the pool. If you have an inground pool, high winds are not going to do much to a pool that's in the ground. Now, if you have an above ground pool in a hurricane zone for some reason, That's probably not going to make it. If you're close enough to the winds. The winds are definitely strong enough, I mean, they pick up trucks and throw them. I'm pretty sure it can move in above ground pool.
[00:04:05] But because your pool is in ground, usually, it's just going to stay in ground unless the entire ground shifts. And we have seen pictures of that, especially on hillsides, not that there's a lot of hills in Florida, but we have seen pictures of like shoreline pools where the entire pool vessel gets ripped out of the hill and thrown down onto the beach.
[00:04:27] There's not a lot of damage to most pools because they're in the ground. But the things around them are going to get torn up. For instance, in Florida, these screened in, I'm going to call 'em screened in porches, but you have these shelters around these pools to keep the bugs out.
[00:04:42] There's probably a word for it, but I don't live in Florida, so I don't know. But you, in Florida, you know what I'm talking about. These screened in enclosures around the pools. They get torn up, twisted up like tin foil. I've seen the photos. It's insane. And you know when you're down there you're like, man, this is pretty robust. It is nothing compared to a hurricane.
[00:05:04] But the real damage to a swimming pool is to its equipment. Equipment is above grade and generally speaking, PVC pipes are pretty robust. They're not going to go anywhere. But these bigger objects like filters and electrical panels, if a branch flying at a hundred miles an hour hits those things, they're going to break.
Electrical hazards
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[00:05:26] Eric Knight: Plumbing can crack. Uh, electrical panels are probably the highest risk of these. So if a wire is severed or you know, there's flooding and electricity and water, they don't play nice. If you have these things, be aware that the hazards are going to be there days and days after the hurricane. Especially electrical.
[00:05:48] I'm not going to dwell too much on that, except that if you show up, the first thing you should do is make sure that the power is shut off to the pool equipment. There's more than enough electricity at that equipment pad to kill you. If you are not a qualified electrician, don't pretend you are. More people get injured and killed thinking they know what they're doing, having no idea that something is completely out of place. Something could be broken that you can't see. Something could have happened to the panel inside the house that you can't see. You don't know what you don't know.
[00:06:24] There's just too many unknowns. It's too much of a hazard, but that's where most of the destruction's going to be. It's going to be at the equipment pad.
What gets into a pool during a Hurricane?
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[00:06:31] Eric Knight: Now let's talk about what can get into the pool. When we think about really high winds and storm surges and floods, the obvious is water replacement. The winds are going to take water out of the pool and the storm surges and the heavy rains are going to put more water back in the pool.
[00:06:49] Now, if it's just rain, that's actually dilution. The wind will take whole water out, which may have cyanuric acid in it, calcium hardness, TDS, salinity, all that stuff. And then you just get rain. Well, rain is distilled water. That could be good for you. But if you're close enough to the eye of the storm, a lot of that water in the air was picked up from the sea and it's seawater.
[00:07:11] It is not uncommon to throw saltwater miles and miles inland with a hurricane. I saw a picture where Tampa Bay was dry for a few hours, or maybe it was a few minutes. I don't know. I saw a picture online. It just sucked all the water out of Tampa Bay. Well, where did that go?
[00:07:28] You don't know what water is now in that pool. But either way, you can assume it's contaminated. Whether it flooded in from the sea and was just a part of the storm surge where it's 10 foot tsunami basically going in land, it's going to pick up everything along the way. You have no idea what's in that water unless you test it.
Biohazard contamination
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[00:07:48] Eric Knight: Now, in a perfect world, you'd get it lab tested for biohazards and all that other stuff, but let's live in the real world here. Most people are not going to be able to do that. Insurance would probably cover the cost of it, but it's really more of a function of time. Labs are going to be overwhelmed. You're not going to get those results in any due time, so you need to assume the worst. Assume that this is a septic tank of contamination because it probably is. So you need to treat this water like it is heavily, heavily contaminated.
[00:08:24] There's also debris that can get in the pool. Branches are the obvious ones. Palm tree leaves, palm trees themselves. But how about trash? How about dead animals?
[00:08:34] How about fish? I saw a picture of, gosh, a few years ago where there was just a whole bunch of dead fish in the pool. It's disgusting. I get it. But that only contributes to the biohazard. These things will decay. You have to get them out. So the sooner you can clean out these pools physically, the better.
Mud, dirt and other debris
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[00:08:55] Eric Knight: But it's not just that. How about mud? Sand, silt, other dirt, plants, shrubs? Who knows what gets in there? The power of nature is amazing. You watch a tsunami, it picks up cars and takes 'em miles. I'm sure there are people that have had cars land in their swimming pools. No doubt. And unless that water's clear enough to see the bottom, you don't know what you don't know.
How to clean up the pool after a Hurricane
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[00:09:20] Eric Knight: So nothing is going to replace physically cleaning the pool. I think that kind of covers the general overview of what can get in the pool versus what damages it. Now let's talk about how to actually clean it up. The first thing I would suggest is water testing. Quick sample, put gloves on, figure out. I mean, you, you're going to have no chlorine in all likelihood, but figure out where's your new calcium hardness? Figure out where is your new alkalinity, and where is your new pH?
[00:09:49] And you might say, Eric, that's ridiculous, I have a car in my pool. I don't care about my chemistry. Yeah, I know. But it's worth knowing before you start taking things out. Even if you only test one of your 50 pools a week, and you learn what did this hurricane do? It's going to help better prepare you for the next one.
[00:10:09] Now, physically cleaning out the pool, depending on what's in it, you got to get on that as soon as you can. Um, I don't know how you get a car out. I presume you find a crane or an excavator or something with chains on it, but for the most part, you're going to be able to get most of the stuff out yourself in most cases.
[00:10:27] Make sure power is off. No stray current, no downed power lines nearby. And you know, I would say common sense, but after a hurricane, there's nothing really normal about that situation. There's stuff everywhere. And we completely understand there could be roads blocked, Power grid is down, no fresh water.
[00:10:48] This is not something that you can just do the next day and say, okay, let's get right back on it. Yeah. In most cases, especially in the, the most damaged zones, pools are not a priority at all. We respect that. I'm not saying they should be compared to the grid. Or the home. Getting a roof on so that the homeowner can move back in at some point.
[00:11:08] We get that, but we're talking when you start cleaning the pool, physically get everything out that you can. Let's say there's a bunch of mud in there. There's no chemical remedy for that. So if you're going to be removing that, use a dedicated trash pump or chopper pump, whatever you want to call it.
[00:11:24] Don't run that through the pool equipment. We've had this happen where we had a customer ask us, I believe it was, I don't know, three years ago? Told to vacuum stuff out and it completely ruined their pump. Why did you run it through a pool pump? The pool pump is not made to pump sludge. This should be common sense, but in a time of crisis it probably is not. So let's just try to think clearly of how do we get this stuff out the most effective way possible?
Chemistry and chlorination
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[00:11:59] Eric Knight: Once you clean these things out, then you can start thinking about chemicals. And there's more than one way to skin a cat. There's more than our way. And we're going to tell you a few of these options. We would say just treat it as if you know for sure it's contaminated. And treat it like a green pool. Because that's going to be a super chlorination where you're also supplementing chlorine to get organics out.
[00:12:22] And you can pretty much guarantee there's going to be organics in that pool. And what we do for the green pool cleanup is one quart per 10,000 gallons of CV 600 and PR 10,000. Combine that with super chlorination first, and you've got a cocktail of things that can wipe out just about anything.
[00:12:42] Now, what that's doing is it's basically freeing up chlorine to do what it does best, and that's kill germs. You pretty much guarantee there's germs in that pool and a lot of them. So you need to supplement chlorine, if anything, go heavier on the chlorine during that process. But that's not the only way to do this.
[00:13:01] If you are looking for a more extreme clean, like let's say it's so dark, you cannot see the bottom and you don't even know what's down there to physically remove it. Some people have had a lot of success using a flocculant, like alum sulfate or something like that. Generally, we at Orenda don't recommend flocculants because it leaves behind alum. But to be honest, in this situation, that's the least of your concern.
[00:13:26] You can use it, clear up the water, drop everything to the bottom so you can see what you're working with. That makes sense in this situation. And the products work pretty well depending on what's in there. So if you want to floc it so that you could see what's on the bottom and physically remove it, like maybe at the bottom there's a, you know, a big piece of garbage that you can't see otherwise.
[00:13:48] Well, only by taking things out and clearing that water are you going to have the ability to know what you're vacuuming or netting or, you know, having to get in there to physically remove. So that kind of thing makes sense.
Draining and starting over
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[00:13:59] Eric Knight: But if it's so bad, like soils just filled half your pool, you're probably going to have to drain that pool anyway. You might need to get like a septic truck to come and actually pull that stuff out of your pool at a much higher industrial grade than the equipment you have available to you in the pool industry.
Conclusion
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[00:14:21] Eric Knight: In conclusion, when you're inspecting the pool, the first priority is to make sure power is not going to that equipment. That's the biggest hazard to you is electrical damage. If there's anything wrong, take pictures of it. Get it to a qualified electrician. Do not think that you know what you're doing if you don't. You got to be honest with yourself here. I can't coach you cause I'm not an electrician. I can't coach you on how good you need to be, but you need to use your own judgment on that. When in doubt, source it out. Get somebody who knows what they're doing to handle it.
[00:14:55] Now, the pool itself, you're looking at contamination. What got in it? Most of it's going to be physical. But there's going to be a lot of other chemicals that get in there. You need to physically get it out, whether it's with an industrial septic truck, or a crane to remove a car, or you know, you got to get tree branches out, et cetera.
[00:15:15] It's going to be work. I'm not going to pretend this is going to be an easy job. Based on the photos I've seen it looks like a lot of work. Most pools, however, once you get the branches out and the physical stuff that one person should hopefully be strong enough to remove, a chopper pump or a waste pump is going to be sufficient it looks like based on the photos I'm seeing to get most of that stuff out.
[00:15:37] For bigger jobs, you need bigger stuff. Once it's clean enough that you can recirculate on the actual pool system, that's when you can start thinking about chemistry. Treat that pool like it's severely contaminated. We recommend the green pool cleanup procedure, which you can find at procedures.orendatech.com or in the Orenda app. Go to the main menu, procedures, you can search the word green, you'll find it. Or you can floc it, and either way, once you get it cleaned out, then you're going to need to super chlorinate.
[00:16:10] You can pretty much guarantee there are going to be things in there that are harmful and you need to get that pool chemically cleaned. That's only happening once you circulate. So I hope this helps. I hope that we've remained sensitive to the fact that this is not a high priority after a devastating hurricane where people have lost everything. If your home is fortunate enough to have withstood the hurricane, I'm very glad to hear that. Happy for you. Be there for those who are not as fortunate.
Drinking water contamination
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[00:16:44] Eric Knight: Another final thought before we go that I have here on my notes. After a hurricane, it's not uncommon for tap water to be compromised. The drinking water plant itself could have sustained massive damage. After Hurricane Katrina, I know the EPA published an article, which we're going to put in our blog about this, that the drinking water was not good enough to drink. That right there is going to complicate things because if you have to refill your pool or dilute it down or whatever else, you probably need to know what's coming into it.
[00:17:20] And after that, you need to super chlorinate again, just to be safe. We don't know what we don't know. Now insurance will probably cover lab testing if you want to go further into that. But generally speaking, what we're talking about here, if you have enough chlorine and you're supplementing chlorine properly and you've got circulation going, chlorine is an excellent disinfectant.
[00:17:42] It will kill just about anything. Provided you adequately cleaned up that pool. So I hope this episode helps. Thank you so much for your time. If you have any comments, you can hit us up at podcast@orendatech.com. If you have specific questions, you can submit that at ask.orendatech.com and you can fill out that form there and we'll get it into our communication center, which is nice.
[00:18:08] Uh, you can send us photos if you have a very specific question. And I hope this episode added value. It's been a tough one, and I want to just kind of circle back because a few years ago we were going to talk about this. And that year, Hurricane Michael destroyed my uncle's home. And I remember that. I remember just how unbelievably devastating that was for that entire area.
[00:18:35] So we withdrew it. We said, You know what? Now's not the time. We're doing it now because these storms are going to continue to happen. They've been happening since time immemorial. They're not going anywhere. So they need to be respected and they need to be expected. We're going to have to deal with more hurricanes.
[00:18:54] So we have to have a process in place to manage the damage.
[00:18:58] I'm your host, Eric Knight. This has been episode 87. Thank you so much for listening. If you have ideas for future episodes, let us know. Thanks.