It was Monday morning when the Holiday Aquatic Center in West Des Moines announced on its Facebook page it was shut down due to “heavy rainfall that created unsafe conditions.”
Around 6:30 p.m. on Sunday, July 20, mud from a hillside north of the facility washed down and infiltrated the pool at 1701 Railroad Ave. in just 30 minutes. The mud sat in the pool for 12 hours before workers came in the next morning and saw the mess.
The facility security cameras captured the muddy moment.
“It looked like we had about maybe 2 to 3 inches of rain water that had kind of got on the deck area and then found its way into the pool,” said Trevor Hoth, recreation program and facility supervisor.
The staff immediately got to work, fixing the issue and opening the pool back up early Tuesday afternoon.
“We knew we could get it done in 24 hours,” Hoth said. “It was an optimistic view.”
A rare occurrence
In the time that Hoth has been working at the aquatic center, he’d never seen the pool get so muddy. Neither had his former supervisor.
Debris of sticks and leaves getting into the pool is a normal occurrence. It’s something that Hoth deals with frequently. Mark Brewick, a supervisor for 36 years before retiring last summer, previously held that responsibility.
But throughout all that time spent, Brewick had never dealt with an infiltration like that.
“When I showed him the videos, he was like, ‘I have seen small amounts of that before, but nothing to that extent.’ We had never had anything as bad as this,” Hoth recalled.
The overnight operation was a success
With the pool typically taking about five days to fully drain, Hoth immediately began to turn elsewhere. The city’s public services department supplied the facility with several pumps to drain the pool at a much faster rate.
Hoth and the crew began the draining process around 1 p.m. Monday, which took 12 hours. Hoth, the only worker still at the facility when it was fully drained, began to refill the poll around 1 a.m. Tuesday.
“Being done with the drainage around midnight to 1 a.m., I can get the pool ready and filled by 8 to 9 a.m.,” Hoth recalled thinking. “And then it just takes some time to get the chemicals balanced after that.”
And that’s exactly what happened. Hoth finished filling up the pool around 8:45 a.m., got the chemicals mixed in around noon and made the call to open the pool at 1 p.m.
The staff and supervisors are brainstorming possible remedies to avoid a muddy situation like that again. Nonetheless, Hoth is grateful the hard work paid off in a swift manner.
“It’s a little bit harder when we didn’t open our normal scheduled hour (at 11:30 a.m.), but it was still a good turnout,” he said.
Chris Meglio is a reporter for the Register. Reach him at cmeglio@gannett.com or on X @chris_meglio.
This story was updated to correct a misspelling.
This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: How a West Des Moines pool went from a muddy mess from heavy rain to reopening in 24 hours
Reporting by Chris Meglio, Des Moines Register / Des Moines Register
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