SUPPORT HURRICANE HELENE VICTIMS: https://www.wryker.com/collections/helene-disaster-relief . Check out with promo code HELENE. What you buy will be matched buy Wryker Supply. Enter your shipping address, but the promo code will ensure the products go on a pallet for delivery to Samaritan's Purse. Eric reflects on the horrific devastation from Hurricanes Helene and Milton, the raw power of flood water, and a reminder that swimming pools are just samples of domesticated water. It's unwise to fight it.
SUPPORT HURRICANE HELENE VICTIMS: https://www.wryker.com/collections/helene-disaster-relief . Check out with promo code HELENE. What you buy will be matched buy Wryker Supply. Enter your shipping address, but the promo code will ensure the products go on a pallet for delivery to Samaritan's Purse.
00:00 - Introduction
03:03 - Hurricane Helene
07:14 - How much rain and flooding?
09:06 - Gravity is a constant
12:44 - Pools are just domesticated water
15:21 - Don't fight water.
16:53 - Announcing WU 1211: Basic Water Chemistry
160. The Undeniable Power of Water
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[00:00:00] Eric Knight: This episode is being recorded on October 15th, 2024. And it's a really hard one to do. The previous few episodes that have come out were prerecorded prior to hurricane Helene and hurricane Milton coming out. And they released after the fact. And I probably should have done an introduction in front of them. Gone back and re recorded over them, but they were already in the hopper and other things were happening.
[00:00:29] This episode has very little to do with pools, although I will tie it into pools at the end. This is just a reminder about the power of water.
[00:00:40] We just witnessed two hurricanes back to back. And of course, hurricanes have been going on for hundreds of years, thousands, probably millions of years, actually. Two hurricanes hitting back to back hitting areas like Tampa and the inside of the Florida Gulf coast. Of course, Florida is used to hurricanes. But not back to back hurricanes like this.
[00:01:00] Who wasn't used to hurricanes was the interior of Appalachia. And that is Western North Carolina, southwest Virginia, Eastern Tennessee, the upstate of South Carolina and Northern Georgia. These areas from hurricane Helene, as you know, are absolutely devastated. I live very close to it. We frequent that area. I live in Charlotte and it missed us by about 80 miles, maybe. But we still got quite a bit of damage in Charlotte from hurricane Helene, which is rare. We don't really prepare for hurricanes because we're so far inland. That we usually just get wind and rain , you know, maybe some flash flooding, but it's never been like, Hey, everybody needs to evacuate. I don't think that's ever happened. At least not in my lifetime.
[00:01:48] This episode is about the power of water. And it really hit close to home when I've seen the devastation. And my friends have been out there in areas that are not the most populous areas in North Carolina. I have a good friend named Will, for instance, who grew up there. And he went out to those towns that are no name.
[00:02:06] Like you'd have to really zoom in on the map to find them. And the devastation in his words is biblical. You cannot imagine what these floods did to this area. And if you've ever traveled through the Appalachian mountains, you know that they're narrow creek beds. It's kind of steep mountains in some of these areas.
[00:02:25] And so most of the towns are in the bottom. They're in the valleys. And then you have these roads that run across the creek. Or the, you know, the slow running rivers or whatever they are. But they're very low in these tight little valleys. And that's what we're going to talk about today. I want to tie it back to swimming pools at the end, but we just want to keep our profession of pool care in perspective.
[00:02:45] And for the homeowners listening to this, you have a pool in your backyard. What we're really doing is we're trying to domesticate a very powerful element. Water. So. Let's get into it, episode 160 of the Rule Your Pool podcast, let's go.
[00:03:03]
Hurricane Helene
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[00:03:03] Eric Knight: First it was hurricane Helene. Now I live in Charlotte and they said, all right, Helene's coming. You know, just like all the other ones do, we're going to get rain. Probably going to be good for our lawns. We in Charlotte had hundreds of trees that just uprooted and came out of the ground. The ground got so saturated that these old Oak trees, particularly these Pin Oak trees, I've learned based on seeing what fell down. They don't really have roots that go very deep. So they're just toppling over, taken out power lines, blocking roads.
[00:03:58] Um, I got to use my chainsaw for four or five days. That was cool I guess. but we were fortunate. We actually didn't lose power in my house. My neighbors did. We were okay, but there's down branches down trees, everywhere. Flash flooding.
[00:04:12] A lot of people had cars that got hit by trees. And it was, I would say for our standards in Charlotte, it was really bad. But nothing compared to what happened West of us. And I say Western North Carolina, I really mean the whole region because the upstate Greenville, South Carolina and North of there, North Georgia. The smokey mountains, Eastern Tennessee, Southwest Virginia, all that Appalachia area. They got it so bad. And I find it amazing that I'm talking to people in other parts of the country that are only seeing the news. And they didn't realize how bad it was, because I guess the news doesn't really do it justice.
[00:04:48] If you're following social media locally, and you're seeing what citizens are posting and the footage and the videos of what's going on over there. Oh, my God. You cannot fathom the damage that these storms did. And I do want to thank those of you who follow me on Facebook and contributed to our hurricane supply drive through my wife's company. Wryker.com. That's WRYKER.com. You can click the link Helene and anything you buy, Wryker will match, and we put it on pallets and send it to Samaritan's Purse and people who need it. So things like tarps shop vacs, and we've got several pallets of stuff.
[00:05:28] It's very impressive. So your generosity is noted. Every penny of it goes to them. So, um, it's not going to ship to you. But if you do the promo code Helene, if you're trying to make a difference wherever you are, things like tarps and shovels and anything that helps in the recovery effort is what they need. There's plenty of food and essentials that are coming in there. And honestly, a lot of it's coming from Walmart again. Um, Walmart did the same thing in Katrina, so kudos to them. They're bringing in hundreds of truckloads of stuff to support the area.
[00:06:00] The problem is how do you get it to the people who need it most? The roads are gone. And just to speak of the recovery effort, it gives me faith in humanity once again. We cannot depend on the authorities, so to speak, to be there for people. And clearly they weren't in this case. Regardless of what you're hearing, everybody on the ground that I know was saying it was volunteers.
[00:06:26] It was citizens who were there. Fleets of bulldozers were being trucked in from other states. Excavators, skid steers, heavy equipment, chainsaws, volunteers. Thousands and thousands, and thousands of volunteers. Hardworking people who donated their time. Came out there, not expecting a penny. Clearing roads. Cutting new roads with bulldozers. Uh, clearing trees with excavators just. Working class people. Not expecting to get paid. Being there for these people to try to open up areas.
[00:06:56] But there are some towns that are removed from the downtown areas like Asheville. How do you get to a town that has had eight miles of their road that leads to their town that follows a creek washed out? Well, you either have to go on foot or you need helicopters.
How much rain and flooding?
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[00:07:14] Eric Knight: The point I'm trying to make here is the level of devastation that we just saw is a very unfriendly reminder of the power of water. So I just want to give you some statistics.
[00:07:24] According to Google, the weight of water is 8.34 pounds. Now, this of course depends on the chemistry of it. If you have higher TDS, it's going to be a little bit heavier. But it's really, what's suspended in water that changes the weight. For instance, muddy water with a lot of silt and stuff in it, like this was, is way heavier than clean water. That makes sense, right? It's carrying stuff. Floodwater, of course is brown. It's taking a ton of dirt, earth, rocks, debris, you name it with it. So it's a lot heavier than just 8.34 but let's just go with 8.34.
[00:07:56] In a cubic foot of water, there's 7.48 gallons. Multiply 8.34 by 7.48 and you get 62.383 pounds per cubic foot. I'm going to round that up to 64, just because we're not dealing with distilled water. 64 pounds per cubic foot. Now to give you perspective on this. Right before hurricane Helene hit on, I believe October 27th, that entire area of Western North Carolina, Virginia, Eastern Tennessee, Northern South Carolina and Northern Georgia had just received several inches of rain. Which was a lot of rain. And it was torrential rain. So all the ground was already saturated. And then in under 36 hours, the average rainfall in the area was over 24 inches.
[00:08:46] For perspective on that. That is trillions of gallons of water that fell in under 36 hours. On top of already saturated earth. Trillions. It was such a vast amount of water and all of it goes downhill.
Gravity is a constant
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[00:09:06] Eric Knight: Sometimes when I teach classes, I remind people, especially pool pros, what constants do we actually have in our business? You know, we can't control the weather. We can't control pricing. We can't control traffic. We can't control gas prices. What constants can we always rely on, whether we control them or not? And I start with gravity. And people kind of like, oh yeah yeah. No seriously, gravity.
[00:09:32] I've never seen a pool fill from left to right. It always fills from the bottom up. Acid will always go to the bottom of the pool if you don't dilute it. Gravity is a thing. Hydraulics. Ask anybody who knows how to plumb hydraulics. Gravity is the name of the game. Water will always find its own level, just like it will always seek its own natural state. Which ties into the LSI and, and Henry's Law is just as guaranteed as gravity.
[00:09:53] So those are constants that we can deal with. Well, gravity had a big part in this because if you already have soggy earth on these steep slopes, and you pound it with heavy winds, tons of rain. I mean just trillions and trillions of gallons of rain. And trees are being uprooted. Suddenly the soil becomes compromised and you started having landslides. And they're washing out highway 40. That's incredible. Water is just devastatingly powerful.
[00:10:24] And just in case we forget, we like to tame nature and create society and all of this. But nature sometimes has to remind us that it's still in charge. And there's nothing we can do about it. All we can do is learn from it and try to build smarter next time and stay out of the way. And.
[00:10:46] I don't know. So many people are dead. So much property lost. The entire town of Chimney Rock, which is downstream of Asheville is gone. Where the downtown area was, is replaced by a river gorge that's somewhere between 12 and 20 feet lower than the parking lot was. It's gone.
[00:11:11] Lake Lure flooded. It almost broke the dam. It's amazing it didn't break the dam. But the entire lake is full of trees, cars, houses. Just crushed everything. My friend Will was out there five days in a row because he grew up there. He's going back and forth between Charlotte taking pictures, but not, he's not there to take pictures.
[00:11:30] He's there to rescue people and he's hiking up these hills and finding people. And he did find a bunch of people who were stranded. So he saved a bunch of lives. And there's a lot of Will's out there that did this. But the way he described it was. You just can't imagine what happened. It's almost like God took his hand and scooped out the middle of the valley and took everything with it. He saw 18 wheelers wrapped around trees 12 feet off the ground. He saw houses smashed into hillsides, just rubble.
[00:12:02] I don't want to dwell on this. It's just, it's so painful and it hits so close to home for me. Our wedding is supposed to be an Asheville. And thankfully all the staff is okay, but they're devastated. Several of them lost everything. The house isn't there anymore. It's just gone. It didn't just flood and they have to replace their carpet. No, their house is gone.
[00:12:25] When you have trillions of gallons of water in that short amount of time. One area of the Swannanoa River in Asheville, it rose 26.1 feet. And downstream, they had a 31 foot flood. That is so much water and it's moving fast. And it's just taking everything with it.
Pools are just domesticated water
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[00:12:44] Eric Knight: And it just reminds me that water is an incredibly powerful element. What we have in our backyard, is just a domesticated sample of it. We filter it, we circulate it, we chemically treat it, and we sometimes heat it. And therefore we can enjoy it. But let's not take for granted what that means. In your backyard pool, there could be hundreds of thousands of pounds of water. If something were to happen, that's heavy. It's a lot.
[00:13:18] Commercial pools, I mean, it's millions of pounds of water. I swam in college and our pool was over a million gallons. So right there. You're talking over 8 million pounds of water. If that just floods out somewhere, it's going to do some serious damage.
[00:13:36] When I was a competitive swimmer, I'm a swammer now, I haven't done it in awhile. I used to give a lot of swim lessons, especially in the summertime. And I would tell the kids the fastest swimmers in the world are not necessarily the biggest and the strongest. They are the people who create the least amount of drag. They don't fight water. They're incredibly good at staying rigid and high up in the water, grabbing water and getting out of its way. Using water instead of trying to push through it. Those are the fastest swimmers.
[00:14:09] Because I don't care how strong you are. You can bench press 315 pounds and you could be super strong, but if you don't catch water right, and if you're pushing against it, you're going to lose to the skinny kid who can move through water a lot more efficiently. Water is the great equalizer.
[00:14:23] And so I would give that example of it's about 64 pounds of water per cubic foot. How many cubic feet do you take up? And you'll find out, wait, water is actually heavier than you are. And you're in a big pool with a lot more of it than you. And it just. I guess I'm doing this, not to talk about pool chemistry at all. It really has nothing to do with that.
[00:14:44] But. We need to be grateful that we live in a time where we can even contain this stuff. That we can enjoy it. Because water can be very enjoyable. It's beautiful. We like looking at it, we like listening to it. There's something therapeutic about the sound of ocean waves, and trickling water, and waterfalls. And rain tapping on the roof. All of that's really nice. But let's not take it for granted.
[00:15:08] Water is still one of Earth's most powerful features. I call it an element. Technically it's not an element, but I think, you know what I mean. All we do with swimming pools is try to domesticate this stuff.
Don't fight water.
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[00:15:21] Eric Knight: And so I guess my message to tie it back to what's relevant to you. It is unwise to fight water. I think you know what I mean by that. This entire podcast references this all the time. It is unwise to fight water.
[00:15:39] Water isn't governed by us. It never will be. Water is governed by laws of nature. Rules like gravity. Water wants to return to its natural state. And I think these devastating storms are a reminder that it is a lot more powerful than you and me. And we would do well to not forget that.
Closing
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[00:16:00] Eric Knight: I know this was a different episode. We know a lot of customers who are struggling in Florida right now. A lot of homeowners, a lot of pool pros. People who have lost everything. My old strength and conditioning coach, actually from swimming, he lost everything. He lives in Tampa, his whole house flooded. The house is still standing amazingly. But he lost everything, all his stuff gone. It's terrible.
[00:16:24] Anyway, I appreciate you hearing me get this off my chest. If you would like to help out, I'll put a link in the show notes. You can use the promo code Helene and you can get necessary things that most people don't think about out to the people who need it most. I appreciate it, and I know they do too. I'm your host Eric Knight with Orenda and HASA. This has been episode 160. And we will get back into our normal types of podcasts in the near future.
Announcing WU 1211: Basic Water Chemistry
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[00:16:53] Eric Knight: We do have some travel coming up. I do want to announce one thing. We are going to be teaching the first ever water chemistry certification course with accreditation for CEU's with Watershape University at the international show in Dallas. That course number is 1211, it's called Basic Water Chemistry.
[00:17:15] There will be a secondary course after that. Not sure what to call that. But Basic Water Chemistry, it is an eight hour course. I get a lot of questions from customers. Hey, we've taken Academy and yeah, we've done private training. Is there a place where we can just get all of this information in one place? Yes, there is. And that's it. I've been spending most of my summer working on it a little bit every single day. It is a monster project for me.
[00:17:37] I've written it from scratch and I've been able to reference things like Bob Lowry's information and cite it appropriately, of course. And there's going to be a lot in this class. So if you are trying to up your game, pool pros, and you want to get through chemistry certification. This is the way to do it.
[00:17:53] There is a cost to it, but it goes to Watershape University. Staying true to our brand, we don't charge for education. But for the CEU credits you're going to get with this class, there is a cost and it goes to Watershape University. Honestly, I don't even know what the cost is right now. But you can go to Watershape.org and reach out to them and find out what it is. But go ahead and sign up. I will also be teaching this class at the NESPA Show in Atlantic City in January, the Florida Show, and the Western Pool and Spa Show. So, if you would like to take. Watershape 1211: Basic Water Chemistry, it's going to be the first time ever.
[00:18:28] And I'm quite excited about it. Eight hour class. So buckle up. There's going to be a lot in there. Anyway, I appreciate your time and we will get back to our normal programming on the next episode. Thanks.