They could possibly move synchronized swimming to the 15,000-seat Olympic Aquatics Stadium, but that would require a major juggling of the schedule with water polo. We did take this problem serious from day one.
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Mr Nascimento added: “We have been trying to clean the pool for four days, and obviously it’s not going as fast as we want it to”.
A starting platform to be used for open water swimming competition due to start here on Monday (August 16) has also broken due to bad weather.
Nascimento said the entire operation will take 10 hours – six to drain almost 1m gallons of dirty water out of the competition pool and four to bring in the clean water using pumps and hoses.
The water in the adjacent diving well turned a dark shade of green on Tuesday.
The water in the larger pool had started to clear this weekend and was a cloudy turquoise for the final water polo games Saturday.
The chemical, which is used to keep pools clean, neutralized the chlorine that organizers were using to keep the pool blue, allowing algae to flourish, they said.
“This (replacement operation) will be done overnight”.
Technicians pump the water out of the pool.
Almost one million gallons of clear water is to be transferred from a nearby practice pool to replace the green-tinged water at the Maria Lenk Aquatics Center here after organisers have abandoned attempts to return it to its natural state.
The colour change has been blamed on a contractor, who apparently dumped around 80 litres of hydrogen peroxide into the pool by mistake.
A spokesman for Rio 2016 admitted that the green colour of the pool is an “embarrassment”. The diving pool, though, did not respond while waterpolo players complained of stinging eyes.
By Saturday afternoon, the diving pool remained a murky green.
The water in the diving pool will not be replaced, Nascimento said, with some competitors privately saying it helps them compete. Andrada said the pool would be drained and replaced with almost a million gallons of clear water before the start of the synchronized swimming event on Sunday.
So what caused the green water in the first place?
Even if it’s not a health problem, Andrada says this is an embarrassment for the organizers. “This was probably the only issue that we were unable to solve quickly”, he told reporters.
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Luckily for them, divers have been taking it in their stride. “So it has some impact but it’s not a big problem”. USA diver Abby Johnston called the pool “a swamp”.
