UPDATE: The lap pool reopened Thursday, July 18 at 4:30 p.m.
A broken jar of salsa may cost the town from $15,000 to $20,000.
A visitor to the Rosemary Recreation Complex on Sunday, July 14, dropped a glass jar that smashed on the deck at the corner of the lap pool, sending broken glass into the pool and prompting its closure and multiday cleanup. The family pool and splash pad remain open.
Stacey Mulroy, director of Park & Recreation, said she and pool staff went into the water to determine whether glass was there. “That was confirmed,” she said, “and at that point we moved right to the procedure to close off the pool and put everything in place to do the draining and the cleaning.”
In addition to draining and replacing the water, the procedure involved cleaning, power washing and vacuuming, rebalancing the chemicals, and checking for bacteria. The final costs won’t be known until the work is completed. “The estimates that are out there are between $15,000 and $20,000 to get this back up to where it needs to be,” said Mulroy. “That’s the rough estimate I’m getting from folks at DPW and looking at the numbers and looking at overtime and staff labor and all the chemicals and everything.”
The pool’s 220,000 gallons of water were emptied into the town’s sewer system and replaced with water from the town’s supply. Staff from the Department of Public Works and the Water Department are handling the project, along with Park & Recreation staff and a pool contractor.
Mulroy said people ask why all that has to be done. “The problem is when it smashes, it’s glass shards, and the glass shards are what we are concerned about,” she said. And the danger is not just that they will cut someone’s foot. “They can float into somebody’s eye or somebody’s mouth or into their lungs if they ingest shards of glass. That is a more concerning situation, which is why we go through this very specific procedure.”
The 140-member Needham Sharks summer swim team uses the Rosemary lap pool for its practices and meets, and head coach Kate Curtin scrambled to adjust their schedule and find alternative places to practice. “We’ve been fortunate enough to reach out to other pools and flip our meets for this week,” she said. “In terms of our practices, the surrounding towns’ pools have been really, really kind and have offered us the availability that they have. So it’s just a matter of making it work for our families and our team.”
The town has not set a date for when the pool will reopen as it waits for the chemical rebalancing, which could be affected by weather.
Mulroy said there will be no repercussions for the person who dropped the glass jar. “This by and large was an accident. This person did not intend to do this,” she said. “It was an avoidable accident, certainly. But we don’t seek retribution for anything that’s not vandalism.
“Please just remind people that we do not allow glass at the pool,” she said.
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