well that article was exactly as awful as the headline sounds.
I work as a pool maintenance technician in Texas. There are laws that are pretty strict for public pools for anti-entrapment drains
From what I’ve been able to read and from what I’ve read from interviews, the pipe was like 6" wide and didn’t have a cover. I believe it was a wall return that she was sucked into. But it was plumbed backwards and so it was pulling water instead of pushing
I work with multiple river pumps and they’re frequently the biggest pumps in the pump room. So the water they return is at a pretty high flow rate and none of them have a cover on the pressure side. The ones I work with have multiple openings of an inch or two
But the main reason this happened was someone fucked up with plumbing the pump and used the discharge side for the pressure side. No idea how someone wouldn’t notice
I think I read that they didn’t disclose that they were renovating and adding a river. No idea why it wasn’t looked at either. So, so, so many levels of failure lead to this
Dunno if it changes anything, but user224 posted this link elsewhere in this discussion, and it says the pipe was 30cm (almost a foot) in diameter – I’m no expert, but the photos in this and OP’s article seem to show an opening about that size to me. I only mention it because that seemed uncommonly large to me.
Blows my mind how neglectful parents are when their kids are in swimming pools. Always trying to find someone else to blame rather than their
lazy ass ‘set em up infront of the TV’ parenting style.
Did you read the article?
“Her poor little body was contorted when she was sucked into this hole and pipe 20 feet back. Her body was inside of the motor when she had to be extracted," Nava continued at the time. "They had to break up concrete in order to extract her, cut pipe. It was absolutely horrific.”
I’m a strong swimmer, and even if I was watching closely anything I did would have only put me in danger without helping her.
Say what you want about how long it took the parents to find the kid, maybe they were wrong, but the hotel is 100% responsible here. If it wasn’t this kid it would have been someone else, maybe an adult in which case what parents would you blame then?
The worst is how common it is for them to leave their children by a pool and just assume that whatever random adults are around will be watching their kids.
Edit: I didn’t say that’s what happened here. Clearly, it’s not. That doesn’t change that what I said above is super common.
Corporations are psychopaths.
So vacuum pipes are not required to have grates installed on them? If not for peoples safety than to at least prevent trash clogs
While there are significant regulations around intake pipes, including grates and/or having multiple intakes so that no single one can be completely obstructed to create a suction scenario where someone can be trapped, this particular pipe was found to be plumbed on the wrong side of the pump. It was sucking in water when it was supposed to be ejecting water.
This is serious for the hotel chain, franchisee, installer/contractor, and inspector. This had to fail so many checks to have occurred. It wasn’t a chance occurrence for someone to be sucked in and seriously harmed or killed with the way this was plumbed; it was a matter of time when someone was going to be seriously injured or killed.
Truly a tragedy, and I cannot for the life of me imagine the pain that family is going through right now.
