New report finds 80% of swimming pools failed safety inspections

Summer is right around the corner, and soon millions of Americans will be cooling off in public pools where, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, they might encounter tiny bits of fecal matter, infectious parasites and volatile chemicals that can irritate eyes and respiratory tracts.

A CDC report published Thursday warns that nearly eight in 10 routine inspections of public pools turned up at least one violation of safety rules. In addition, about one in eight of those inspections found problems so serious that the pool had to be closed.

These statistics are based on 84,187 routine inspections of 48,632 public pools and other “aquatic venues” in Arizona, California, Florida, New York and Texas. Researchers focused on these five states because they are home to 40 percent of the nation’s estimated 309,000 public recreational water facilities.

The CDC created the Network for Aquatic Facility Inspection and Surveillance in 2013 to keep tabs on the safety of public pools. In the preceding 35 years, 650 disease outbreaks originating in public pools were reported to the federal agency. The largest happened at an indoor water park resort in Ohio in 2007, when chlorine mixed with sweat and urine in pool water to create chemicals called chloramines. Local health authorities tallied 665 cases of eye and respiratory tract problems among resort patrons and lifeguards.

That is not to say that Americans would be better off if they stayed away from public pools. On the contrary, swimming and other “water-based physical activity improves physical and mental health,” Michele Hlavsa of the CDC’s Division of Foodborne, Waterborne, and Environmental Diseases and her collaborators wrote in the report, which appears in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. What’s more, they added, water-based exercise might be the only option for people with certain medical conditions.

In any case, swimming is a hugely popular American pastime. According to the Census Bureau, more than 50 million Americans over age 6 go swimming at least six times a year. So if public pools — at water parks, hotels, summer camps, apartment buildings, fitness clubs or municipal facilities — aren’t safe, a lot of people could suffer the consequences.

This is what prompted the CDC, along with the New York State Department of Health, to develop the Model Aquatic Health Code. Hlavsa and her co-authors set out to test how well the nation’s five biggest public pool states were measuring up to the code. Here’s some of what they found: 79 percent of routine inspections turned up at least one code violation.

The number of violations per inspection ranged from zero to 21; the median number of violations was two.

12 percent of routine inspections found a violation that resulted in the immediate closure of the facility.

Among the most common violations were problems with a pool’s pH level (seen in 15 percent of routine inspections); problems with safety equipment (13 percent); and problems with the concentration of disinfectants (12 percent).

The nearly 50,000 pools included in the analysis aren’t necessarily a representative sample of public pools throughout the country. That means the results reported by the CDC can’t be generalized to all states or venues, the study authors cautioned.

Even among the five pool-heavy states that the study focused on, some counties shared more inspection records than others.