Pool which left 23 children ill needs major overhaul
An ‘‘outdated’’ aquatic centre where 23 children fell ill needs millions of dollars worth of upgrades and maintenance work to bring it up to standard, says the council that operates it.
Upper Hutt City Council is proposing a full upgrade of H2O Xtream Aquatic Centre at a cost of $17.5m over the next decade.
Eleven children were taken to hospital and many others required medical attention on April 1 following a chlorine-related incident at the facility.
It was just the latest in a string of incidents involving children becoming ill and pool closures at the 26-year-old facility.
‘‘The facility is ageing; it requires a lot of expensive, ongoing maintenance and needs a complete overhaul,’’ states the council’s Long Term Plan 2021-2031, which has gone out for consultation. ‘‘New plant and maintenance work will bring the facility up to standard and give it another 25+ years of life.’’
That report was released less than a week after the latest incident, although Upper Hutt Mayor Wayne Guppy said the facility is not dangerous and there is no correlation between the need to upgrade the plant and filtration systems and the April 1 incident.
‘‘The fact of the matter is that the facility is old. It’s 26 years old and there needs to be some work done on it,’’ he said.
The children, students from Tawhai School in Stokes Valley, were seen vomiting, fainting and hyperventilating after using the water slides on April 1.
Two weeks on, the three water slides remain closed due to WorkSafe restricting their use until they are deemed safe.
Initial reports to the council from WorkSafe have suggested a lack of ventilation on the slides was a contributing factor to the children becoming ill.
Two hours before the first child fainted, the slides had been closed because of a chlorine reading in the water of 4 parts per million (ppm).
‘‘The facility is old . . . and there needs to be some work done on it.’’ Wayne Guppy
Upper Hutt Mayor
Upper Hutt City Council communications adviser Matt Weavers said this was within the New Zealand standard maximum of 7ppm.
The slides were reopened once the reading had dropped to 2.9ppm. Within 10-15 minutes the first child became ill.
Less than seven days earlier, the aquatic centre had to close due to an issue with the filter system and chlorine levels.
In December 2019, an unknown number of children were taken to an after-hours clinic and the activity pool was closed after chlorine levels rose above normal limits. Weavers said the council didn’t have a record of how many children were taken to the clinic, but the school involved reported that 12 children were absent the next day.
Weavers said that H2O Xtream had since adopted more regular manual testing timeframes than the New Zealand standard.
He said the slides would remain closed until the council and WorkSafe were confident that any remedial work would ensure that a similar event did not occur again.