The Pool of Problems: NOW OPEN

Alright, so the pool has now been open since the last week in June giving reason for my blogging hiatus. I generally work a combo 8 hours in the morning at the hospital and 8 hours in the evening at the pool or 12 hours at the pool followed by an 8 hour night shift at the hospital...time for anything other than work is hard to come by and sleeping and eating have been winning out over the blog. My body has adapted to sporadic naps at this point, so I am hopeful to catch the blog up to date in the next couple days.
Anyways, in regards to the pool, where I last left off, suited up in arctic explorer garb, we prepped the pool for paint with acid. This was then followed by several days of drying and painting. It should be known that none of us possessed any professional training in regards to pool painting, but when in Kuujjuaq...

With my taping expertise I think it turned out pretty well...Sadly 2 weeks in to the pool being open large amounts of paint in the shallow end have chipped off but don't blame the painter blame the paint

After several days of sweaty painting (imagine a greenhouse and you pretty much have the Kuujjuaq pool) and drying, the water trucks were called up to fill. 28 water trucks and 2 days later the pool was filled. Over this 48hour period I met the entire staff of water truck drivers holding many an awkward conversation of me asking polite questions about the weather and their life in Kuujjuaq only to receive one word answers or sometimes only facial expressions...(it takes at least 20min for each truck to empty so one can imagine the awks level...HIGH).

The water filling the pool comes straight from the river and is therefore both cold and filled with mineral deposits from the runoff, ie not crystal clear. The water treatment plant delivered to us giant vats of chlorine to add, however they were unable to provide us with its concentration level...cue the beginning of pool problem hell. Having really no clue what I am doing and going on the fact that there is zero chlorine in the added river water, we dumped an entire barrel in. The indicator chlorine test gave us a result of zero leading us to assume more should be added...BIG MISTAKE. Two more barrels later and still a reading of zero chlorine we realize that high levels can actually bleach out the indicator leading to the false assumption of zero chlorine when really you have WAY to much. It is impossible to say exactly how much too much we had, but I would roughly estimate at least 100 times over the desired level. Anyways we drained and diluted and all was fine, minus the fact that the plumber probs hates me. Sadly this was not the end of our problems, next we find that there are huge leaks in the foundation...large amounts of water flooding the basement and slowly draining the pool, despite the fact that multiple times before we started to fill I requested some to come for an inspection. Anyways 3 days later (another building in Kuujj was flooding and apparently there is only one crack filler) a pseudo patch job was performed meaning the crack are now only producing miniature streams instead of lakes and rivers. Again not the end of the problems...THE HEATER WAS BROKEN!. After speaking to the plumber (with which mutual hatred is shared) asking multiple times that he has checked to make sure the heaters are working, after 4 days of waiting for the pool temp to go up he discovers that the heat exchanger is broken, and by discover I mean I pointed to the heat exchanger and said I didn't think heat was being exchanged....


Anyways, after my boss claimed if we didn't open ASAP the town would be sending me home on a stretcher...because really everything that went wrong was entirely MY fault, we opened with a pool temp of below 60 degrees Fahrenheit (normal pools are around 80-84). The kids didn't seem to care, the pool has been packed to capacity everyday since, although it is now 84 degrees.

Cue 7 days a week of the most dreaded three hours of my day...Public swim, 80 screaming children magnified by the greenhouse, zero adults, limited English and ages ranging from 3-12.

The smile in this picture is purely for show