Viewers and experts alike were baffled when the Olympic diving pool in Rio suddenly turned a murky shade of green earlier this week.
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At least one athlete even claimed that the pool “smelled like a fart” and the competition pool also began to change colour.
They are racing against the time to replace it with one million gallons of clean water before Sunday afternoon’s synchronised swimming competition.
It was revealed that 80 litres of hydrogen-peroxide was put in the pool on the day of the opening ceremony on August 5 – a chemical that should never be combined with chlorine, as any pool owner knows. This creates a reaction to the chlorine which neutralizes the ability of the chlorine to kill organics. We did all the chemical tests’.
Olympic organizers took “extreme measures” by draining a swimming pool that had turned green and refilling it Sunday, just a few hours before the start of the synchronized swimming events, an official said.
Nascimento said organizers will not drain the water in the diving pool, but will instead try to improve the pool’s filters.
Andrada and Nascimento held a news conference Saturday at the site of the pools, the Maria Lenk Aquatic Center, where they said they did not want to assign blame for the mishap, although it appeared that the errant hydrogen peroxide had been added by a local pool-maintenance worker who believed he was doing the right thing.
“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.
Many divers felt uncomfortable with the color of the water and feared that it was green because of pollution or another problem that could harm their health.
Hydrogen peroxide is normally used as a disinfectant and for bleaching purposes.
Andrada said Rio organizers have had their fair share of problems in what he called “this journey” of hosting the Olympics.
Still, visibility underwater is a major issue in synchronised swimming, where competitors spend lots of time underwater and need to be able to see their teammates.
American Abby Johnston, who also qualified for the final, said her “chemistry brain was going ‘what?'” when told about the hydrogen peroxide dump.
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“It should be light blue, transparent. We learned painful lessons the hard way”. We should have been better in fixing it quickly.
