Swimmers emerging from pool with bloodied feet

By ANDREW MCGINN
a.mcginn@beeherald.com

Something is cutting up the feet of swimmers at the Jefferson Municipal Swimming Pool.

All evidence seems to implicate a $28,000 paint job two seasons ago by a Johnston-based pool servicing company.

“We’ve got some paint chipping going on,” Vicky Lautner, Jefferson parks and recreation director, said Monday.

The solution could be as easy and cheap as a pair of swim shoes, according to Lautner, but the fix could require the city of Jefferson to drain the generations-old, 400,000-gallon pool.

That would force the pool to be closed for weeks, and would doom the Jefferson Swim Team season.

“We’ve been told to drain the pool,” Lautner said, describing some of the parent complaints and Facebook criticism she’s taken in recent days. “I’m one to try to work through the problem.”

“This has been really frustrating for me,” she added.
Just draining the pool of water would take a week and a half, she said, which doesn’t take into account the amount of time needed to get a company on site to repair the chipped floor and walls.

The pool then couldn’t be refilled for three weeks after it was repainted, she said.

“It’s a tough spot to be in,” Lautner said. “We’re trying to do everything we can to keep the pool open.”

Lautner has “never, ever” experienced a problem like this with the pool.

She purchased 25 pairs of swim shoes this week in a variety of sizes for kids to use this season at the pool.

She plans to purchase 25 more pairs once they get a better idea of what sizes are needed.

The pool vacuum has been sucking up chunks of paint from the pool, Lautner said, and those will be sent to Acco Unlimited Corp. in Johnston for analysis.

Little brown chips have surfaced as well, she said.

Lautner wonders if it’s possible Acco’s paint didn’t adhere to the concrete.

Acco, which services commercial pools and water parks, painted the pool in the fall of 2015, she said, at a cost of $28,000.

“They didn’t guarantee five years,” Lautner said, “but they said the paint job should last five years.”

Prior to that, city employees repainted the pool every three years, she said, with fresh paint typically rolled over previous layers.

In 2015, Acco blasted those previous layers from the floor and walls.

Lautner said she contacted Acco last year “because I thought it looked kind of thin.”

It was only after the pool opened this year that rough patches were exposed, cutting the feet of swimmers mostly in the northwest corner of the shallow end.

It’s too big of an area, she said, for putty to be applied.

Lautner said there are rough spots as well in the five-foot section, and that paint is coming off the walls of the deep end.

The municipal pool dates back to the Great Depression, when it was built as a Works Progress Administration (WPA) project.

It underwent extensive renovations in 1987.

“If people keep getting cut,” Lautner said, “we’ll have to drain the pool.”