Sure it is–for certain values of the word “chemical”.
Let’s assume an in-ground pool with a size of 25’x45’ and an average depth of 5’. It holds approximately 42,187 gallons of water. Let’s assume the pH needed to be adjusted with 1 gallon of 10% HCl. You’ve just put a tenth of a gallon of acid in over 42,000 gallons of water. Since the pH was already high, the acid will react rapidly with basic species in the water to bring the average pH down to neutral in short order (the reaction rates are extremely rapid), meaning you no longer have acid. You’ve got almost neutral water with a tiny concentration of salts. I don’t think your throat is even going to tickle.
If the pH is off, the chlorine won’t do diddly.
So, you need a proper pH range and chlorine.
While I agree that the muriatic acid dilutes quickly, it’s not quite as quick as it is being made out to be. Again, not being a chemist, I have no idea if the stuff I pour in my pool is some special formulation or not, but it has a consistency a bit thicker than water, and depending on where it is poured, can certainly stay fairly concentrated in a small area for a short amount of time. In fact, it is typically recommended to only add a quart at a time, and wait 12 hours before adding any more and/or testing pH levels, even if your calculations tell you that you need gallons to get the pH back in line.
Typically, even if your pH is a bit above 8.0, a smaller pool (15k gallon range or so) will only need a quart or two to get back in line. The most I’ve heard of is a ratio of about 1 gallon per 2000 gallons of water, although you’ll rarely see that as a recommendation by any experts. You see this happen because someone read something on some message board stating that it was a way to “shock” the scale from your pool. The problem is it also drops the pH like a rock, and things like pool heaters aren’t real happy about that.
Then we must post a message on the swimming pool: CAUTION: Stir well before drinking.
And yeah, acid will be slightly more viscous than water, but even 12N is nicely mixable. You’re waiting that long because you want an accurate pH reading for the whole pool, not because there’s a ball of acid lurking in the middle. (if it helps, I *am *a chemist, but I leave the swimming pool treatments to my colleagues out back where the test pools are)
Can I hit you up with chemical questions that I can’t get answered at my local pool supply place? 
A call your baloney and raise you pastrami.
Laundry bleach has 1/4 to 1/2 the concentration of “liquid chlorine” used for swimming pools. On an 8m3 pool (that type you assemble) I use 1 liter a day. Chlorine comes in 4-liter bottles and i ususally have two or three. A “permanent” pool has at least triple that ammount of water.
I cannot belive that most people regularly have that much household bleach.
For small-time (up to 100 litres) bleach is OK.
We’re talking about the pool owner. I have 12-20 gallons of Clorox around at any time (I use 2 gallons to shock the pool).
Watch the pool get hurt, pool!
A more serious answer is that until relatively recently, ships didn’t travel very far from land so could carry sufficient water with them. When they did, glass was expensive and fragile and took up a lot of deck space. Besides, those sails were great for catching the rain.
Okay, not only do all those private pool owners in the US not follow our safety and health regulations for their swimming pools, you also seem to have a wildly different form of chlorine?
I asked a friend who worked in a public (regulated) swimming pool. He said he wouldn’t want to drink from a normal swimming pool because:
it very very quickly gets bacteria in high amounts.
The chlorine is unhealthy.
Imagine a normal pool - children peeing in ,people loosing skin cells, etc. In other words, organic particles. Now, to keep the water reasonably clean, you add chlorine - the green gas from big bottles. A part of the chlorine bonds with the organic particles and becomes “bound chlorine” AND STAYS IN THE POOL. The other, the “free chlorine”, gases out from the water or is broken down by the UV from the sun (so an outdoor pool will leak a lot more chlorine than an indoor one.
The “free chlorine” then forms the chloramines, that have been found out to cause cancer in the long run. That’s why the way public pools are built has been changed, so less gas clouds can form.
You also need to add an acid to keep the pH at a certain level.
This is different from the water out of your tap - your water provider starts with reasonably clean water, and adds chlorine to keep it from becoming bacterially contanimated.
But pool water starts out with dirt and stuff in it, and the bacteria start multiplying the moment you stop monitoring and adding stuff.
Even worse, any kind of tarp or glass cuts out the sanitizing effect of the UV, and the bacteria will multiply.
While normally, being a bit sick is preferrable to dying of thirst. some bacterias or viruses carried by mutated E. Coli can cause very nasty diseases.
So his advice would be to always boil the water, and start treating the water as soon as possible, because the longer you wait, the harder it gets.
He also wouldn’t want to add so much bleach that kills all bacteria and then drink the stuff.
Also, about the algae: while it’s not advisable to eat every algae, if you filter them out with a piece of cloth, the algae themselves are unrelated to the problem of bacteria contamination, so the water could be safe.
An expert (which the OP didn’t want) could set up a balanced system, with some fresh water-fish like trout, and some indicator crabs/snails (those little organisms that only live in clean water), with the fish eating the algae, and the algae thriving on the fish, and add some pounds of sand to filter out the rest.
In other words, built a natural swimming pool (Sorry, only the german language articles have a lot of information - the english one is a stub.)
Sure, if you trust the word of an organic chemist who happens to have lunch with the pool chemicals chemists now and then.
Who said that? Chlorine is an element. Pure chlorine can be obtained as a gas. More convenienty chlorine is distributed for pool disinfection in the form of either sodium or calcium hypochlorite. Common household bleach is an aqueous sodium hypochlorite solution. Many of the tablet systems use cal-hypo. “Salt” systems convert NaCl present in the water into sodium hypochlorite on site. They all do the same thing - chlorinate the water to remove harmful pathogens and organic materials.
Death by dehydration or by water-borne disease is unhealthier. Remember the OP wasn’t questioning whether we should start bottling up the municipal pool for fun and profit. I wouldn’t want to drink out of the local swimming pool either, but I’d chose that over the nearest creek or slime-filled pond.
Yes, in the form of chloramines. Most of those organic residues have nitrogen which combines with the chlorine. That’s where the chloramines are coming from.
Yes, we’ve established that.
Disifection byproducts as a result of chloramine disinfection or chlorine disinfection are present in your municipal drinking water as well. Yes, they may be carciniogens, but consider the WHO:
"The World Health Organization has stated that “the risk of death from pathogens is at least 100 to 1000 times greater than the risk of cancer from disinfection by-products (DBPs) {and} the risk of illness from pathogens is at least 10 000 to 1 million times greater than the risk of cancer from DBPs”
I don’t know where your municipal water comes from, but mine comes from a reservior or the nearest river. It is far from clean when it’s disinfected. If it was already clean, it wouldn’t need to be disinfected.
The UV is breaking down the sanitizing chlorine. If it was killing bacteria in sufficient quantities, municipal water wouldn’t need to be purified by chlorine, bromine, or ozone.
My water comes from the mountains, and it’s one of the best drinking waters in Germany, which has high standards for drinking water, anyway. Very strict standards. The city of Munich, for example, to ensure that the water stays as clean as possible, paid farmers all along the valley of the river to change to organic farming (starting in the 80s), so there would be no nitrogen and no liquid manure polluting the water. But then, our city sanitation and drinking water system is over a hundred years old, started by Pettenkofer after a Cholera epidemic, and the responsible people back then thought ahead long-term when building the system.
The water company only adds chlorine in rare cases of very heavy rain that overwhelms the normal filtering systems.
Well, the city paid for some 40 communities upstream to install special UV lamps at the final stage of their sewage plants, to kill the bacteria left over, so that the Isar river would have bath water quality for Munichians to swim in.
Yes, normal sunlight doesn’t have UV concentrated like chlorine. But we were talking about a situation where the normal chlorine system doesn’t work, and the chlorine in the pool will quickly leave, and then - if you don’t add chlorine, which is problematically - the sunlight shining on to the pool will reduce the bacteria a little bit more than no sunlight because the pool is covered with a tarp, was my point.
Chlorine is the least of the problems with swimming pool water. The greater danger is all of the other stuff pool owners add to keep the water swimmable: Muratic acid, clarifier, algaecide, descaler, rust remover, etc., etc. I don’t believe condensing pool water vapor on a sheet of glass into a container will remove most, or any, of the above. My guess is you’ll need some kind of reverse osmosis filter or some other device to filter out everything except water. In a life or death emergency ‘condensed’ pool water may be OK, but the muratic acid will really beat up your kidneys. Does anyone know of a hand pumped RO filter?
Haven’t the zombies already beat this topic to death? 
You don’t need an RO filter for pool water. As has been discussed previously, all you need to do is let is to let the water sit out in an open container to let some of the excess chlorine outgas. If you’re really squeamish and you have the means, boil it first.
As for muriatic acid, that’s just hydrochloric acid (HCl), the same acid present in stomach acid. It dissociates completely in water as soon as it hits the water. It’s simply used to (slightly) adjust the pH of the pool water. If you’ve ever drunk rainwater or pond water in the Northeast, you’ve drunk water more acidic than that of pool water. Most soft drinks are more acidic than pool water. Aqueous hydrochoric/muriatic acid certainly will NOT “beat up your kidneys.” Where did you get that from?
The chlorine content of the water is negligable anyways as the level, even if recently shocked, is not harmful. And if in doubt about the bacteria, just boil the water for 3 to 4 minutes. And in the worse case scenario, pool water will be a luxury out here in California where it does not rain much. Its much safer than stream or river water for sure.