Saltwater system could cause lasting damage to pool
At a Nome Common Council work session last Monday, November 9, Parks and Recreation Director Chip Leeper brought in Bob Walker, owner of Polar Pools and an expert on pools in Alaska, to report on a number of issues concerning the Nome Swimming Pool. Primary among them was that the saltwater purification system could be causing dangerous and expensive structural damage to the pool.
The Nome pool is more than 30 years old, Leeper said. It was originally built with a traditional chlorinebased purification system.
In response to calls from the community, the City changed to a saltwater system in 2006. Advocates of saltwater systems point out that saltwater is gentler on the eyes and skin and that saltwater pools theoretically require less maintenance. But Walker, who has installed and worked on pools all over the state, said the salt can also cause serious corrosion on metal components.
Nome’s pool has had various issues for years, as many aging pools do, and most of them could be fixed with routine repairs. The reason Walker and his team came to Nome in the first place was to replace the concrete pedestals under the main pumps, which had shifted over the years and were causing some pipes to leak.
One of the more concerning problems, though, was the slow, steady loss of water that had been going on for years.
“One of the things we continuously need to do is pretty much keep a garden hose on a lot of the time to keep the pool water at the level it needs to be,” said Leeper. “There was always speculation we could be losing it out of a couple of different places.”
A loose drain or a hole in the pool shell were potential culprits, but Leeper never had the ability to pinpoint the leak exactly. Then COVID19 hit and offered a unique opportunity.
“When the pandemic started and we shuttered all facilities, I wanted to save electricity and money on chemicals, so we pretty much just turned the pool systems off and let it sit,” Leeper said.
The idea was to let the pool slowly drain itself until the water got below the leaky spot, at which point it would stop leaking. Sure enough, the water level started to go down, until it stopped just a quarter inch below the gutters.
“That wasn’t surprising because all our gutters are stainless steel, and at all the joints where they’ve been welded, you can see that we have a significant amount of corrosion,” Leeper said.
Walker said he’d seen that kind of corrosion in other saltwater pools around the state. Since salt naturally wears away at metal, it can have devastating effects in pools that weren’t originally built with a saltwater system in mind.
He recommended immediately switching back to a chlorine system to prevent further damage, which could eventually corrode the concrete pool shell and make it structurally unsound. He estimated an immediate switch to chlorine would cost $20,000 to $30,000.
He also recommended a complete replacement of the gutter system down the line to prevent further damage, which would cost about a half million.
In the subsequent Nome Common Council regular meeting, the Council decided to get a second opinion before taking any drastic action. In the meantime, the pool will continue to use saltwater. It still needs some small additional mechanical repairs before it can reopen to the public.
City Manager Glenn Steckman said that the supplies needed for the last bit of renovation are taking longer than expected to arrive. Leeper added that due to the nearly six-month closure, he would need to retrain all the lifeguard staff once the pool was running again, which would take even more time.
While the pool doesn’t technically need to stay closed for public health reasons – either a saltwater or chlorine-based purification system can kill the virus that causes COVID-19, Steckman said – the mechanical and staffing issues mean it still probably won’t be open in the near future.
Leeper said he hopes to restart some programming with the school system by the end of 2020, but that no one could say for sure when the pool would be back in action.