“Chlorine is no longer obligatory in swimming pools in Wallonia“. That’s what newspapers of the Sud Presse group announced on Saturday 2012, January 14th. Avoiding chlorine as a disinfectant would be advantageous as to our health and our environment. (See: the Go Chemless system for solutions). As part of a commentary by Frans Vos, Materials Consultant, “To ban chlorine from swimming pools is a matter of safety”,  in November 2011 an unfortunate and fatal travesty was suffered by the parents of a five month old baby that was struck by a loud-speaker that fell from a ceiling above a swimming pool. Chlorine stress corrosion-cracking of stainless steel supports was identified as the cause of the failure.

When water that condenses on the supports evaporates again, droplets of highly concentrated chlorine solutions are left behind. These chlorine concentrations, combined with temperatures of 35 to 50°C in the upper regions of the swimming pool, and the tensions to which the supports are subjected are an ideal combination to initiate stress corrosion-cracking of stainless steel. In most cases the envisaged solution was to replace the stainless steel supports by supports made of other materials, yet the fatal accident in Tilburg shows that this is not yet a common practice everywhere.

As it’s still to be awaited what will be the reaction of the materials in swimming pools when they will be subjected to other disinfectants, eliminating chlorine from swimming pools will ultimately be an advantage. Possibly for our health and environment, and of course for our safety.