Olympic officials say they will drain the larger pool at the Maria Lenk Aquatics Center to remove the green-tinged water.
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The whole operation should take about 10 hours, Nascimento said – 6 to drain, 4 to refill – but they should be able to pull it off before the synchronized swimming on Sunday.
On Sunday (NZ Time), Olympic officials gave up on trying to clean the green-tinged water in the main pool, instead draining it, with plans to transfer almost 3.8 million litres of clear water from a nearby practice pool in time for the start of synchronised swimming. Officials insisted that athletes were not put at risk by competing in the green water.
Olympics organisers said they would pump millions of litres of water from a Rio pool on Saturday (Aug 13) after admitting defeat in clean-up attempts after it turned from blue to green. It was embarrassing said the Olympic officials. However, the water in the pool for synchronized swimming and water polo was a bit bluer and lighter. And we should have done a better job fixing it quickly. Who knew that we could all learn a valuable life lesson from the green fart water at the Rio Olympics?
According to the New York Times, somebody accidentally added 160 litres of hydrogen peroxide on August 5 to the pool used for diving, which neutralized the chlorine and caused it to turn green.
“There are not huge complaints about the performance of the athletes and the health and safety of the athletes” using the diving pool, he said. The nearby polo and synchronized swimming pool began its transformation on Wednesday.
An adjacent, smaller pool will continue to be used for the diving competition, even though it remains murky. Worse, because there was still some chlorine in the pool, the monitoring system didn’t flag the problem immediately, leading to several days of competition in green water. “The water in the warm-up pool is in ideal condition”.
Divers will still be stuck with green water.
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Olympic officials said the reason the pool turned green in the first place was because someone mistakenly added more than 40 gallons of hydrogen peroxide, which allowed “organic compounds” to grow, the New York Times reports. “They produced an unforgettable win over Serbia, one of the most powerful water polo teams ever, so they were so happy and excited to beat them, they said to keep the water the same”.
