How Safe are Public Pools?

I have done extensive research on the subject in my bathtub, using silverfish and dung beetles as test subjects.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to find waterslides that small?

I will try to summarize a few updates that might answer some of your questions that haven't already.

Lifeguards and swimmers who were at the pool Monday and Tuesday told investigators the water had become murky since Sunday, raising the grisly possibility the body’s decomposition may have been contributing to the decreasing clarity.

Veronica Reis, 21, a friend of Joseph’s, told a reporter that the 9-year-old boy who preceded Joseph down the slide tried to alert lifeguards, but said they ignored him. He then tried to rescue her, but could not.

“The little boy was trying to pull her back up, but he couldn’t,’’ she said. “She was too heavy, and she was too slippery from the water.’’

Joseph went to the pool Sunday afternoon with two other adults and six children from their Fall River neighborhood, said Reis, her downstairs neighbor, who dropped them off.

At 5 p.m., when the pool was closing, Reis went to pick them up. But no one in the group knew where Joseph was, and, after waiting a while, they went home.

“We thought she probably came back home,’’ Reis said.

On Monday, however, Joseph’s 19-year-old son, Rudy, who lives with her, asked Reis if she had seen Joseph. She had not.

Reis called Joseph’s cellphone frequently, but when she got no answer, figured she was staying with a friend.


For the full update - http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2011/07/01/inspectors_failed_to_see_body__in_fall_river__pool/?page=2

so the boy didn't go to the other people he was with and say anything?
He didn't say anything to people in the pool with him?
Other people didn't notice a boy trying to pull at someone or something?
The kid doesn't freak out and start screaming?

He never mentions to anyone at all that he was trying to pull this woman up?

He gives up and just continues to play in the pool with other people.

IF this is true I have to ask, is something wrong with this kid? Is he slow or something? (notice how PC I'm being?)
9 years old, you're in what? 3rd or 4th grade. I sure would know to tell someone else right away. My neighbor who's in the 1st grade would know to do that. Her 3 year old brother would scream bloody murder if that was going on with someone he was with.
When everyone goes to leave, he doesn't say "She's at the bottom of the pool?"

They said they've done an autopsy, but haven't released the results. I really want to see that.

I know the whole thing is just so odd...how no one reports this woman missing afterwards and they kind of say - oh she will disappear for a few days - very very odd.

Also, from reading some of this - it sounds like friends and family are planning on suing already - "we can't afford a funeral - who's going to pay for it..."

Not that they shouldn't if the findings are such - just seems odd that these are things being said at this point - prior to autopsy results.

Far be it from me to sound skeptical , but saying a woman had been in the bottom of a pool for 2 days with no one knowing (and by association, caring) sells more papers (I know, old analogy) than waiting to find out what else may have happened.

Ok, I'm thinking of the lifeguards are probably like in most places, younger people. If these lifeguards are interogated by the cops, and it's true that the kid did approach one of them, the cops will get the truth out of one of them soon enough.

Another thing...

As a parent, let me ask you this linkat. If one of your girls had something like this happen, and they thought "I gotta go tell someone" would she go to the lifeguard, or to you or another adult (or the group of adults she came with)?

I'll be honest, I can't remember seeing a kid go up to the lifeguard at a pool and talk to them. Once in a while an adult does, for a brief question or to tell them something, but not a little kid.
Kids know the lifeguard is there, but as far as their concerned as to what they do, it's more like "that's the person who blows the whistle and tells us not to get on someone back, dive headfirst, run around the pool."

yep you got that - my kid would run up the known adult - however most likely would start screaming - the reactions all around just seem - odd.

Run up screaminig to a known adult.

I know I'd start screaming.

Well going take off for the weekend - but I am curious as to the upcoming results.

How deep was this pool? most don't go over 7 feet.

Why didn't the kid say anything when she didn't come out after they slid down the slide?

This all seems spooky to me. Bet she died somewhere else and the body was dumped there.

Overreaction is a classic then things like this happen. Whoever was responsible for preventing it from happening wants to show off that they are not negligent, and if there arent enough sense-making things they can do, they will go ahead and do some that make no sense =)

There are only so many things that can go wrong with a pool. It wasnt the chemical composition because it would have affected everyone who went into it. Maybe the woman hit her head somewhere or fainted for some reason and had her lungs instantaneously filled with water (heard this can happen if you fall/impact on water the precise right way) but even them, it sounds impossible that nobody else in the pool would notice, and that everyone would ignore the boy who supposedly saw it. And then nobody would notice it for two more days.

Off course, I only have the information given here so its just guesswork, but to me it sounds like she was murdered and her body showing up in the pool was part of the murderer's plan on making it seen like an accident. And the murderer was probaly someone close to her, maybe more than one person.

This deep-water pool at the deep end (where the body was found) is 12 feet. there was murkiness to the pool water since the pool opened on June 25th. The murkiness was there prior to the accident. There were 2 lifeguards that were told of the drowning by the 9 yr old boy. The first LG said he was on break. The 2nd time it was reported by the boy was to lifeguard #2. LG said they would soon conduct a poolwide search. It is unclear (to me) if the search actually happened.

Here's the latest news reportage. This shed some additional light on some of the happenings:

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2011/07/02/boy_wishes_he_could_have_saved_swimmer/?p1=News_links

"The mother of the 9-year-old who reportedly tried to alert two lifeguards separately about the apparent drowning of Marie Joseph at a state-run pool here Sunday said in an interview yesterday that her son is despondent and keeps saying he wishes he were bigger so he could have saved the woman.

“He’s sad because he saw the last moments of Marie’s life, and when he tried to do something, nobody listened,’’ said Danyelle Hunt, 30, standing in the parking lot of her apartment complex, about 2 miles from the pool.

An investigation into the death of Joseph, whose body was discovered after two days at the bottom of the Veterans Memorial Pool in Fall River, found that she drowned Sunday afternoon in water that was so murky that a police diver could not be seen at a depth of 3 1/2 feet to 4 feet, prosecutors said yesterday.

Investigators said the body of Joseph, 36, was submerged at the bottom of the 12-foot deep end of the pool from the time of her drowning Sunday afternoon until Tuesday evening, when her body surfaced as a result of “natural postmortem changes of the human body.’’

That's the simplest explanation fitting all known facts - what's impressive on this thread is that at least 3 posters would rather believe in conspiracy theories.

The behavior of the people involved is unbelievably strange, thats why.

Exactly - it seems so incredible that no lifeguard would search or listen to the boy. It also seems incredible that the boy would go about playing with his friends after experiencing this. Also, incredible that no one seemed alarmed that this woman did not go home with the group.

The fact that the water was murky and no one saw the body is not what seems unlikely - the reactions of friends and family and the lifeguards seems so unbelieveable.

Just think if you did not leave or show up with the group you went to a public pool. How would your friends and family react?

It looks like she wasn't with the group -- she was already there, and the boy ran into her (he knew her because she was a neighbor). (That's from the latest story, that ragman linked to.)

It's coming together as a plausible but unfortunate tale, something like:

- The pool has been murky for a while
- The boy ran into an acquaintance (Joseph) at the pool
- He saw her go down after the slide into the pool
- He got a lifeguard's attention, this one said he/she was on break. (Jerk.)
- He got another lifeguard's attention, this one said that he/she would do a check of the pool in a minute.
- The boy had told authorities and they said they were going to do something about it -- he went back to what he had been doing (playing with friends/ relatives.)
- If this is how things went down, this is where he should have been a lot more insistent about making sure that the lifeguard actually did what he/she said she would do -- but the kid's 9, and I get how it's possible that it's not how things happened. I'd suspect that around here he was feeling guilty and trying to put the whole thing out of his mind, too.
- No search took place.
- The kid and his party (which had not included Joseph) left.
- The kid says something to his mom but she doesn't think he's serious.
- The kid has told authority figures and he's a guilty, confused kid.
- Joseph stayed at the bottom of the pool for a couple of days, unseen because of the murk.
- Joseph's body started decomposing, and gases etc. caused it to surface after a couple of days.
- The first people to see it were the after-hours couple. (Good thing too, that it was them and not a passel of little kids arriving in the morning.)
- Kid is extremely upset and blaming himself for not saving her.


If this is actually how it happened, I think the lifeguard who said he/she would do a check, and didn't, is the chief villain. With the pool management who decided to leave the pool open when it was illegally murky in close second place.

There have been several different accounts of this including she took the boy there and was supposed to be watching him; when she was missing and everyone left, she left her keys, cell phone, etc.

But yet leaving those things behind did not warrant an alarm?

agreeing with linkat as to the villan, except the one on "break" is the first one accountable.

I'll be honest, I'm still skeptical of this story, but if the kid did tell 2 different lifeguards, they are total dimwits.

by the way, not to digress, but what exactly does pool "murk" consist of?