They have day camp at the branch of the YMCA I occasionally swim at. The kids are all elementary school age. There is no kiddie pool, just an olympic sized lap pool that the camp uses for the campers to play in during specific time blocks during the day.
I have no doubt that the pool is used as a bathroom to some of these kids. My question is, what happens to urine once it enters the pool water? My guess would be the chlorine would kill the bad bacteria…but would the urine ever chemcially change to non urine? I don’t think a pool filter can filter out urine…over time, would a pool ever become a certain % urine and a certain % water?
I was watching some show where a guy was getting a kidney transplant. When they hooked up the tubes, urine came squirting out of it, splashing all over his exposed internal organs. The surgeon said it was no big deal, because urine is perfectly sterile.
Also, I wouldn’t assume that being elementary school age is a big determinant of whether or not one pees in the pool.
Modify that to say “Urine is sterile, unless it’s not”. It is entirely possible that a pool urinator may have a bladder infection in which case the urine may be a festering colony of bacteria or fungus.
Consider the thousands of gallons of water along with the chemicals verses the several liters of sterile urine that may be introduced and you really don`t have a problem.
Exactly. For a 25 m x 3 m deep pool (say 10 m wide) you have about 750 000 liters of water. If you have 50 swimmers and they each donate half a cup of urine (125 ml .125 l) that gives you 6.25 l or 1 part in 12 000 before anything gets cleaned up through filtration, chemicals etc.
The chlorine in the pool reacts with the organic molecules from urine, skin, oils, all that crap and a bunch of it gases off as various chloramine compounds (more or less); the by-products of these chemical reactions are what makes your eyes sting and it’s also what you smell around a pool (if you were actually sniffing chlorine gas, you’d be coughing up chunks of lung tissue).
So yeah, some components of urine get chemically changed to “non-urine”, although other parts like the salts would probablt stay salts.
In addition to the dilution factor, water evaporates, filters are backflushed, waste water is discharged, and make-up water is added along with enough chlorine to make the pool water safe to drink even with all the crap floating around in it - assuming the staff are dosing properly. Don’t worry, the pool won’t turn into a hugs basin of festering pee over the summer :D.
