Basking in a D.C. public pool on a warm spring day, neighbors discovered something wrong with the blue pool floor – it rubbed right off.
“My hand came away with blue paint on it,” said Megan Michiels-Markowski. “If there’s paint that rubs in your hands it’s obviously going to be mixing with the water.”
The paint came from the deep blue floor of a shallow kiddie pool, typically enjoyed by sunbathing college kids and crawling babies, at the city’s Francis Aquatic Facility at 2435 N St. NW.
The pool next to Francis School near Dupont Circle temporarily closed after neighbors discovered the paint problem.
“It’s serious, but it’s also correctable,” said Ward 2 Councilman Jack Evans, who urged the city to shut down the pool after Michiels-Markowski alerted him to the problem.
The D.C. Department of General Services announced that the Francis Aquatic Facility would remain closed this weekend and reopen June 22.
“The pool will be drained, chalked, repainted and refilled,” the department’s statement said.
Evans said that he found it troubling that pool staff was slow to address the problem.
As a temporary solution, workers wrapped caution tape around chairs, encircling the shallow pool without closing the entire pool.
Evans said, “The perception is that it’s dangerous, you should close it immediately and fix it.”
A city spokesman said there was never any danger to swimers — though he couldn’t say what type of paint the city had used on the bottom of the kiddie pool.
“We’re going to blast that area and repaint the area,” said Darrell Pressley, a spokesman for General Services, “just to err on the side of caution and to ensure that this doesn’t happen again.”
The repairs will cost the city about $7,000.
“The pool had been painted several years ago and that was prior to [the Department of General Services] coming into existence,” Pressley said, “but there’s not evidence that there was an incorrect paint.”
He said that that aging paint may have undergone a chemical reaction in the hot sun then began to rub off.
