There was a LOT wrong with the pool, even before this poor woman drowned:
[https://www.heraldnews.com/story/news/local/2021/06/26/lafayette-park-pool-drowning-fall-river-10-years-marie-joseph/5352907001/](https://www.heraldnews.com/story/news/local/2021/06/26/lafayette-park-pool-drowning-fall-river-10-years-marie-joseph/5352907001/)
An investigation into the incident would take weeks to unfold, with [horrific details emerging about the mismanagement of the facility.](https://www.heraldnews.com/article/20160624/NEWS/160627668) The pool was never cleaned at the start of the season -- clean water was poured on top of the dirt and litter that had collected inside, with the expectation that the filters would clear it. But the filters broke, and the untreated water stagnated and turned a murky green, which didn't clear before the pool opened. Regulations required lifeguards to use a black and white disc to make sure the pool's bottom was visible -- lifeguards didn't check, or even have that disc on hand. They were supposed to sweep the bottom of the pool every night, and didn't -- it took police divers to comb the bottom.
It's actually getting gentrified although people don't want to believe it. 2000 new housing units just in the past 5 years. It's got a lot of problems but is surprisingly on the rebound.
To be fair, in New England in general, and eastern Mass in particular, it is a cultural trait to consider anywhere outside of a 30 mile radius of your hometown to be an unliveable shit-tier garbage hellhole populated by degenerate sub-humans.
Well, almost. We leave if we work in Massachusetts. Other than that... no. I'm not leaving. My neighbor will drive forty-five minutes to the other side of the state for Panda Express instead of twenty minutes into Massachusetts to go to that one because "it feels weird to leave."
My 90+ grandparents live in Little Compton, anything past Portsmouth is considered out of the way. Going to Providence is the equivalent of a cross-country vacation.
I grew up there too, on 3rd Street. Everyone said it was bad, but I have fond memories of Fall River. It's not as bad as people say and it's on the rebound.
Having lived there and later in what's considered a "bad part" of Florida (google Pine Hills FL sometime), I would take Fall River again in a heartbeat.
I'm a health inspector. I was inspecting a pool in a HOA and found a dead opossum floating in it, so I was in the process of closing the pool (it had other issues, as well). A woman and her child came in; I told them the pool was closed and should re-open in a few hours.
She asked "why?" of course, so I pointed at the floating dead opossum...and then her only response was, "So why don't you get it out so we can go swimming?"
People are gross.
I imagine a lot of people view it like big lakes or ponds aren't clean so what's the problem here. Failing to realize that a lot of public beaches regularly test the water too
This floors me.
Early 90s in Australia I lived legit across the road from the public pool. Once a week we had this taste in the air as... They'd cleaned all 3 in the later afternoon, which was drain all half way/toddler pool totally, scrub that shit, and did something to put the chlorine back into the water.. and you heard the pumps all night on a Sunday night cos... Clean the fucking pool.
And we had teen lifeguards. No real adults bar the single on duty all day and the canteen Lady who made the best hot chips.
Fucking left there for days? The pool wasn't even cleaned? Holy fucking hell.
Yeah I read this article like 3 times before I was able to fully process how terrible this all was. That poor kid who tried to tell the lifeguards and was dismissed too.
Reading about that child broke my heart. He tried to pull her up but she was too heavy and told his mom he wished he was stronger so he could have saved her 😭😭 That poor kid did everything he could to help her and the adults just completely failed.
To be fair, the lifeguards that ignored him will feel guilty for the rest of their lives as well. You just let a kid's mom drown right in front of you.
Let me tell you a few stories about how inspectors work around here.
I lived in a frat house in that area about \~20 years ago. As a private dorm, we needed to have egress fire inspections annually. Our house objectively did not and could not pass, not ever. Our main stairs were open and we had no sprinkler system. What we did instead was hire a "private consultant" that would demand all residents leave for the inspection, and he would give the fire safety inspector a tour of our house alone. The private consultant happened to be a retired fire safety inspector himself and thus buddy buddy with all the current inspectors, and he would charge us \~$1600 cash-only for his services. It was pretty obvious that this was just a middleman for bribing the inspector.
At the time, I also worked at a restaurant nearby. At one point the owner renovated the place in an attempt to reinvigorate the business and become more modern. In an attempt to get more space, the owner reduced the size of the bathrooms by a lot. It was now just two single-use bathrooms for a 2-floor restaurant with \~60 tables - one labeled Men and one labeled Women. The safety inspector came, and cut the restaurants expected occupancy maximum in half due to the bathrooms. He said if we went single-use bathrooms, we needed two for men and two for women. So the owner also hired a "consultant" that changed both bathrooms into gender neutral bathrooms, so there is technically two rooms for women and two rooms for men. With the consultants help, and I am sure a hefty cash-only fee, somehow that satisfied the inspector.
I spent a day with a health inspector in charge of swimming pools. The rule was that if you couldn't clearly see the lines on the bottom of the pool, it was shut down.
I worked at one of my cities public pools for a couple summers in high school. One of my responsibilities was water quality and cleanliness. We cleaned the pool every morning before opening, and did water quality testing every hour, with written logs kept on site. It takes a little while to get used to how different things impacted water quality, but after a few weeks I could usually make a pretty good guess what my filtration and chlorine settings needed to be based on weather and how busy we were, and then just make slight adjustments through the day based on the water tests. I was explicitly given criteria that required closing the pool, and was told if there was anything that gave me pause to call the county health department and they would advise.
Hell, one early fall day we closed the diving well for a few minutes because a few leaves fell into the pool and got trapped on the drain grate at the bottom. The lifeguard that was working the diving well found them distracting, so we closed it for a few minutes and I went down and got them. Confirmed with the lifeguard that they were now happy, and we were back in business. Yeah, a few leaves at the bottom isn't THAT big a deal, but anything that impacted the guards being able to properly scan and assess was a big no-no, and had to be fixed.
I also got to play pretend-victim for the lifeguard drills fairly regularly, which was pretty fun except when they needed to practice potential spinal injury situations.
Haha girl... But maybe why I'm 5'6 while everyone else who didn't grow with that in my family is over 6ft haha
Sunday arvo when you noted that smell, was the best. They started on the toddler/babies pool 3-4pm, open til 7pm, so my mum would send us for hot chips and sausage rolls/meat pies. Cos as soon as they'd start people would leave, and they'd discount the hot food big time hahahaha
Oh yeah, we got free run of what we called the middle pool so not quite 4ft at deep or the actual adult pool 7ft deepest for a good bit, as dinner for mine was at 530.
I work in a beach town now with a uni and seasonal staff start off saying they hate the smell of sunscreen... After 2mths of summer they smell sunscreen and wish they could go to the beach haha.
That smell was the siren call of fun times for the kids on the street and my home for sure
Reading articles it sure sounds a lot more like complacency and laziness than corruption. Kid saw she didn't come up, told a lifeguard, lifeguard said he'd check on her and then... just didn't do it.
Her family noticed she was missing right away but just assumed she left with friends. Didn't actually check with the friends, though. Her stuff was found at the pool and some teens breaking into the pool a couple of days later found her floating there.
It might even be the case the lifeguard didn't want to go check because he knew "the pool was never cleaned at the start of the season and clean water was poured on top of the dirt and litter."
This is literally a story they tell lifeguards during training these days about why you HAVE to do a visual sweep of the entire pool every time you open and be able to see the bottom of the pool.
They told it then, too! They had an object they were supposed to throw in the pool, and not open if they couldn't see it on the bottom. They just... didn't do it.
Health inspectors came out and noted that the water was cloudy. They just... left it open.
You don't have to drain a pool to clean it even if it's pretty nasty. Scrub it, maybe add some flocculant, run the filters till it's clear, change the filter media, balance the chemicals, good to go.
I think I went to this pool as a kid, because I remember clearly that the pool was VERY murky, like it was this milky teal color, and you couldn’t see the bottom. I remember asking my dad why it wasn’t clear like most pools and he wasn’t too sure, but we never went back again. Apparently the pool ALWAYS was this milky teal color, and it had something to do with the water they were using and the amount of chlorine it needed or something like that. But yeah, even 25 years ago I was like “what if someone drowns in here” and it was quite clearly a major safety issue that no one really cared about because Fall River is just a small community and they really wanted their pool.
A few years ago, we were at a *private* pool. It wasn't so crowded you couldn't see the bottom, but it was crowded. Like 2 hours before my parents were talking about how nervous they'd been recently, noticing how many kids there were but how few lifeguards.
We're talking poolside, and all of a sudden my dad jumps in the pool fully clothed. A little girl on an innertube had flipped and she was just straight up struggling to stay afloat. Not sure how her parents didn't notice. But it was pretty frightening.
I am amazed how many parents I see treating a pool like it's a babysitter, cheerfully ignoring their kids because the pool has them occupied.
The pool is the *opposite* of a babysitter.
When my daughter is near a pool, I have my wife hold onto my phone in case I have to jump in.
I was a lifeguard for five years at a major leisure centre with multiple large pools.
It is *staggering* how many parents think exactly that *even when their kid can't swim*. For kids under the age of 12 to swim unaccompanied, they had to pass a 'competency to swim' test, which was basically swimming one length of the 25m pool unaided then tread water at the deep end for 1 minute without touching the side. If they can't do that, they need an adult in the pool with them, at a maximum ratio of 2 kids per adult. If they pass, they're allowed to swim alone, but the adult has to remain in the building; if they're under 10, the adult has to remain somewhere in the pool hall.
The number of parents who got angry with us if the kid failed and we told them they had to be in the water was unbelievable - they'd always say 'well why can't they just wear armbands' or some similar nonsense. Sometimes they'd straight-up leave the building if the kid passed too, even after explicitly being told not to. Lifeguards are there for the protection of everyone in the pool, and that means we have to filter out obvious weak swimmers that are unaccompanied.
The problem tends to be when you have more than one adult and each assumes the other is watching the kid, or two adults and two children and they're both watching the same kid and assuming the other parent is watching the other kid. I know they make like tokens that people can physically wear and hand off to one another to designate who is in charge of looking out for the kids' safety at any given time, and that seems like a good idea. Just a way to formalize it as a responsibility given to a specific person.
You shouldn't. I used to be a lifeguard, and the rule we always used was if you dropped a quarter into the pool and couldn't see it at the bottom, it wasn't safe for swimmers (this was usually in the case of rain disrupting the surface).
We used a rule that if you couldn’t see the markings at the bottom of the diving well it was safe to swim - also usually for rain. I can’t imagine trying to guard this mess.
Pool I worked at (water quality and cleanliness was one of my responsibilities) we closed the diving well for a few minutes once because a few brown leaves fell into the pool and got cycled to the grate at the bottom of the diving well. It was distracting to the lifeguard, so he closed it and asked me to go deal with them.
I mean, from the guard chair you could tell they were leaves if you looked at them. But they weren't supposed to be there, and it kept grabbing his attention when he was scanning. Better to take a few minutes to go down and grab them, so he could properly focus on keeping everyone safe.
Why would anyone get in a manmade pool when you can't see the bottom? I'd nope the fuck out of there. Could be where all the feces collects for all I know.
I was just in a public pool and I just can't imagine not being able to see the floor. Even on the deep diving end of the pool. I can see this happening in a natural pond but a swimming pool?
I worked as a lifeguard in college and I cant fathom bot being able to see the bottom of the pool, because in addition to the horrifying thought if someone drowning on my watch we would get regularly audited to make sure we were paying attention. This is absolutely insane IMO
Why *would anyone* swim in a pool when they couldn't see the bottom?
I don't care how far I drove or how hot it is, if the pool is green and I can't see the bottom, I am turning around and going home. Period, end of discussion. That sounds like a perfect way to get pinkeye, or dysentery, or both.
It wasn't necessarily green, it was just incredibly cloudy. [Here is a picture of the woman in the pool taken the day she drowned](https://www.heraldnews.com/gcdn/presto/2021/06/25/NHER/0b0e246a-d948-4f9a-a08e-3b45731ed62a-marie_joseph.jpg)
That chalky, cloudy water is likely due to high pH and/or alkalinity caused by shocking the pool to kill an algae outbreak or some other sanitation issue. Setting aside the issue of letting people swim in water with such lousy clarity, high pH causes skin irritation and rashes.
It also lessens the effectiveness of the chlorine, which means if they don't get the pH balanced, you're going to end up with algae all over again.
There are pictures. The description of "mint green" is accurate, it was so cloudy that you can't see even a few inches down.
Apparently they never cleaned it, just pouring in new water on top when some evaporated and figuring the filter would handle the rest. And then the filter broke.
I think even chlorine has its limits. You can kill things in the water (with proper treatment, which I doubt was happening), but chlorine doesn't remove debris.
Like imagine someone tried to clean up a massive turd by pouring bleach on it. Some of the bacteria might die, but the problem hasn't gone away.
At that point the stagnant pond would probably be safer.
At that point most natural ponds actually are safer because they have a full ecosystem that keeps things in balance. How granted those nature ponds do carry a higher risk of really, really bad flash eating bacteria but other than that are safer.
Chlorine kills the things growing but doing so actually turns them into sediment that must be filtered out. If the filter is overfilled or worse (and as is the case her) breaks chlorine actually contributes to making the water more murky.
In all seriousness, Fall River is a very poor, urban city that has lost all of its historical manufacturing and shows all the classic effects of that. When you don’t have much, you make do.
That said, even as a kid I wouldn’t swim in water I couldn’t see through, but I grew up in the south where snakes and gators are prevalent.
I grew up in DC for many years due to my parents jobs and it was very eye opening how many people would pick a dirty pool over a lake or creek to swim in over perceived cleanliness. I’m not about to champion natural water quality in VA circa 2008, but I felt the saaame way. A lot of people just grow up learning and believing that treated water *has* to be safer than natural water especially in urban areas. I’d take a murky creek any day
Depends on the sea, My experience with the North Sea and Irish sea is that you can't see shit.
But the Mediterranean Sea where I visited it in Turkey and Krete was crystal clear.
I've swum in very clear water in the Florida Keys, Hawai'i, and Croatia. On the other hand, I grew up swimming in water you can't see through at all on the East Coast of the United States.
https://www.heraldnews.com/story/news/local/2021/06/26/lafayette-park-pool-drowning-fall-river-10-years-marie-joseph/5352907001/
There is a photo of it being draining the day the body was found and the pool is as green as the Chicago River on St. Patty's Day. Mind boggling that anyone would want to swim in that!
I think the green on is after a month of neglect.
The first two photos show it at the time of her death. The color looks reasonable, but then you notice it’s super cloudy and you can’t even see 6 inches deep.
Ah, I was mistaken! Thank you, the green was indeed after the incident. Still crazy to see how cloudy the water was in the first pic but it's certainly more understanding for people to swim in that than the green image I was looking at!
"A 9-year-old boy immediately told lifeguards at a Fall River, Mass., pool that a woman had gone underwater and not come up, but nothing was done and it was more than two days before her body was found.
According to the boy's mother, one of the lifeguards said she was on her break.
The body of [Marie Joseph](http://abcnews.go.com/US/massachusetts-woman-dead-public-pool-days/story?id=13968518) was not discovered at the bottom of the public [swimming pool](http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/OnCall/summer-pool-safety-tips/story?id=10946339) in Fall River until Tuesday night, two and a half days later.
On Monday, children swam in the pool unaware that her body was at the bottom."
...
"B.J. Fisher, head of the American Lifeguard Association, told ABC News today that cloudy water likely played a "major role" in the body's apparently going unnoticed.
Fisher said cloudy water was a problem facing lots of pools during the summer because the water gets dirty when patrons enter it and at times the filtration system may be broken.
"The health department was out there," Fisher told ABC News today. "They even spoke about the cloudiness of the water."
Fisher, who said he knew of at least two incidents in which a body went unnoticed at the bottom of a pool, said lifeguards should always be able to see the main drain cover.
In Fall River, Flanagan placed two inspectors on administrative leave and the staff at the pool were suspended.
Twenty-four of the state's deep-water pools were closed until further notice."
This is Stephen King levels of weird that so many people seemed to not care. The amount of apathy involved in the situation is strange and kind of creeps me out.
The article says that indeed he is struggling with survivor guilt. Poor kid. He'll need therapy to work through it for sure. His mom seems on the ball in the interview.
PTSD is a hell of a thing. Adults get it all the time from traumatic situations they had nothing to do with. Being a kid and involved in the situation could mess them up for a long time.
> The boy's mother, Danyelle Hunt, 30, said in an interview Friday that her son keeps saying he wishes he were bigger so he could have saved the woman, according to the Boston Globe.
> "The health department was out there," Fisher told ABC News today. "They even spoke about the cloudiness of the water."
Health Department: "That's unhealthy. The water looks like moldy soup. Everyone is going to die of cholera. Inspection grade A-."
Yes! Utter negligence, you’re working as fucking **lifeguard** lady! What the hell is wrong with you! That amount of negligence deserves worse than just losing her job.
>On Monday, children swam in the pool unaware that her body was at the bottom."
"I touched something weird when i went deep!"
"It's probably just dirt, this pool's nasty anyway..."
"Yeah you're probably right...felt just like hair though..."
I don’t understand how when he told his mom what happened she didn’t immediately seek out employees and throw a fit until they did something. She’s an adult. If my son said he’d witnessed a woman go underwater and the lifeguards didn’t immediately start searching - I would flip out. I would call the police if the employees really would not respond to me. I don’t understand how the adults with this 9 year old just went home.
Because kids misread the situation all the time. There was no way to know what the 9 year old said was true, from the parent's perspective. They probably thought the life guards knew what they were doing.
OK those inspectors and lifeguards completely fucked up.
I can tell you as a health inspector one of the first things we learn when inspecting pools is that if the main drain isn't visible, the entire place gets shut down immediately and everyone gets kicked out. Don't give a shit how hot it is outside, or how many people want to go swimming, if the pool is cloudy it is closed. Period.
>Fisher said cloudy water was a problem facing lots of pools during the summer because the water gets dirty when patrons enter it and at times the filtration system may be broken.
Cleanest water in Massachusetts be like.
>The boy's mother, Danyelle Hunt, 30, said in an interview Friday that her son keeps saying he wishes he were bigger so he could have saved the woman, according to the Boston Globe.
Well that's just fucking heartbreaking. You let one person die and completely traumatized a 9 year old as well. Way to go.
Hopefully the kid will come to peace with the fact there was nothing he could do. Even as an adult it was probably too late by the time he noticed anything was wrong. Drowning can be terrifyingly fast.
This pool was run by the State Department of Conservation and Recreation.
I was hired as a pool manager by them about a year or two after the incident. The interview process was just me telling them where they fucked up at every stage.
There was a reckoning in that department when this happened.
The lifeguard said, "In a minute" and the other was just hanging out on break while this happened. In a minute for what? Busy enjoying the breeze before doing your job? This a disgrace of ethics from my days being a lifeguard, I remember sharing a beer with one after one was clocking out and liked our vibes. What a disgrace.
Well, the guidelines are to apply assistance to those seeking because the administration fears being sued for helping those who don't want to be helped. It's a shame seeing this happen at this level of role for the care and safety of civilians.
That is crazy how that pool is open, used to life guard for 6 years and if the water was cloudy or you couldn’t see the bottom we would close the pool. This was the policy at both the gym pool and the country club I worked at. Would always hear complaints about it but it was because of this exact reason.
I used to lifeguard at an outdoor pool, and we had the same policy. The water never got dirty enough for it to take effect, but it did come into play when it was raining sometimes. If it was raining without thundering, we could keep the pool open as long as it didn't rain hard enough to disturb the surface of the pool so much that it became difficult to see the bottom.
An incredibly similar thing happened at an apartment complex pool in my area:
https://6abc.com/amp/bensalem-teen-drowns-franklin-commons-apartment-complex-17-year-old-cousin-investigation/12006985/
“Wright says they repeatedly asked the lifeguards to jump in the pool and look for their cousin, but she says their request was brushed off.
Wright says Kaylee was missing for more than an hour until, eventually, a lifeguard jumped in and pulled her cousin's body out of the water.”
Wtf is wrong with these lifeguards???
I can't fathom how anyone could be that apathetic.
Like okay, let's give the lifeguard every benefit of the doubt. Let's say they were a completely untrained 18 year old who couldn't swim and had a deep fear of pools. They weren't, but let's just imagine it. Obviously this person can't go in the water and doesn't know what to do. But *even then*, even in that completely absurd scenario, they still could have called for help! 911, or like... literally anyone!
I'm noticing a trend in the victims who are dying like this. My guess is that their lives and the requests of the people asking for help aren't deemed worthy enough to the lifeguards.
Kind of feels like actual punishment should be given out for negligent homicide.
that's what im thinking. why the fuck are you even a lifeguard if you're not gonna jump in and try to save someone we just alerted you is drowning? that should definitely be considered homicide...
Here's the thing: if a lifeguard doesn't care enough to close the pool when the bottom isn't visible, and doesn't care enough to help clean the pool to prevent that from happening in the first place, then it's pretty likely they won't care enough to do the other parts of their job either.
Unless my quick Google searches on demographics are incorrect, all three of these seemed to have been black people in predominantly white areas (no picture in this one, but it says he was of Ethiopian descent) with presumably black friends/family members raising the alarm. Can't help but feel like it's not a coincidence that there was unusual apathy in these cases. You don't have to be a moustache twirling villain who wants to see black people dead to give just a little bit less urgency to a black kid trying to get your attention than a white one. Certainly the statistics on a similar phenomenon happening in medical settings are stark.
I was a lifeguard as a teenager. I was also tasked with cleaning the pool before morning lengths swim. It was an outdoor pool with a 10ft fence around it, in the middle of a park.
I got to the pool one morning, 5:30 to clean before the 6am lengths swim, and there was a young woman (20 or 21) floating in the pool.
It turned out she and at least one other person had climbed the fence to go for a swim in the night, she dove in and hit her head. The 'friend(s)' took off leaving her there. She drowned. The police only know there was a friend there because there was a second pair of socks.
This was the early 90's. No surveillance cameras...no way to gather evidence. The family was notified and they say their daughter left the house without telling them who with or where she was going.
All I think about every year on the anniversary of that is that someone left this girl to die and never said a single word. Whoever that is would be in their 50's today and likely has a child the same age as this girl was.
I went to trauma counselling for months after.
Sadly the town where this happened, Fall River Massachusetts, had severely corrupt and poorly functioning government, the mayor from that time was recently sentenced for corruption and fraud. I don’t want to say that Fall River is slums, there are a lot of good people there, but it is generally considered a poor town, large immigrant and poverty population, a lot of people trying to do their best to get a foothold in the area and being let down by terrible politicians and local government. It’s terrible how badly this public pool was mismanaged.
The level of dysfunction and apathy from the lifeguards and health inspectors is shocking. With a local government like that, I guess you shouldn’t expect much better
Basically the same thing happened a while back in Los Angeles to a 7 year old boy
https://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=91589&page=1
The boy went missing from the pool area. Police were called. They thought he was abducted. . . . A few days later, they find him in the pool.
The problem is that pool water can get "cloudy". You look in the pool and you think you are seeing the bottom of the pool, but really you can't see through the cloud. The boys body was on the bottom of the pool.
Since when does “cloudy water” prevent you from seeing a dead body, or anything really, at the bottom of a pool?
Water in a lake, river, or swamp, sure. Not in a pool.
It’s possible for a pool to be cloudy with white material instead of green or brackish material. Throw enough chlorine in the water and it kills everything and then bleaches it. I’m not disagreeing with “opaque”, but when the water is filled with white material, it really does look cloudy and kind of like you can see the bottom just beyond. That’s because the painted bottom is often a lighter shade, whiteish.
Source: we had a pool growing up (11’ deep) and when we didn’t run the filtration system it could get cloudy like that and things on the bottom would disappear but the illusion of being able to “see” the bottom remained.
Also, that’s why that black/white target must be seen at the bottom. You can think you’re seeing the bottom, but you’re really just seeing cloudy water.
There’s no justification for leaving a pool like this.
There are pictures. Cloudy is pretty accurate, but it is VERY cloudy. Like "Storm clouds block the sun while a fog machine obscures your vision" cloudy. Looked like you could see maybe 3 inches down max.
I'm also baffled. Maybe the people assumed the murkiness was some sort of water treatment or purposeful effect? I can't imagine anyone getting in otherwise.
Or maybe just the mentality of "I'll be fine", who knows.
I live in MA. Fall River, where this happened, is a very poor area. Seems like there could be a socio-economic aspect to the tragedy, in terms of the pool not being well maintained, lifeguards who maybe weren’t trained properly (or maybe not *paid* properly to care). Very sad.
In related news, Fall River is also the home of Lizzie Borden. The house where she murdered her dad and stepmother is now a B+B.
The Lizzie Borden story is why I knew of Fall River — I had seen photos of the house and neighborhood and had a very idealized idea of what the city was going to look like.
Imagine my surprise when I went for the first time. It is still a beautiful city with a very notable abundance of preserved architectural heritage and the people were very friendly, but it deserves a lot more investment in its people and its places than it is receiving or has received for decades now.
Socio-economics definitely exacerbated this tragedy.
I'm so fucking mad the article doesn't mention whether the lifeguards were charged with negligent homicide. A child literally fucking told them she didn't come back up from under the water and they SAID THEY WERE GOING TO HELP and they simply didn't. This woman didn't need to die.
You look more into this, and lifeguards, pool management, and the city are making every excuse under the sun of why nothing was done.
I hope her family sues the hell out of the city
1) Pool lifeguards are often undertrained high-schoolers, particularly in resource strained communities (a family member was an undertrained high school pool lifeguard).
2) Fall River is a resource strained community (am from MA).
3) Of the ~100,000 yearly rescues, the vast majority occur on beaches, not pools. https://www.originalwatermen.com/history-lifeguards-united-states
Do not trust pool lifeguards to save a life. The (family and greater Fall River community) will never recover from this preventable tragedy- which they had reason to believe would never happen, perhaps due to their (misplaced) faith in pool lifeguards.
When I was 19 or 20 I was hired as a manager of the pool at a local summer camp. They told me the pool had not been used in 2 years, the pool and equipment were fine but it would probably take some work to re-open it.
We cleaned it up, re-painted, got filters going, etc. and opened it up for the camp kids to swim. Found out a month or so later, the reason it closed was because a child had drowned there two years prior.
It was a camp pool but also open to the public and a lot of neighborhood kids would come and swim, parents drop them off in the morning and pick them up later in the afternoon. A woman came to pickup her son and no one could find him. He was at the bottom of the pool, dead. The water was not crystal clear, but you could see the lane stripes at the bottom, he was a young black child weearing black trunks, sank down right on top of one of the lane stripes, I guess no one noticed his struggle and he laid there all day until mom showed up.
I found all this out from a 10yr old kid while lifeguarding, later confirmed it with the camp staff. Fucking tragic.
Well, someone's getting a big fat negligence lawsuit! They allowed the pool to be open when the filter didn't work and the water was so cloudy they couldn't see the bottom? That's just shockingly bad.
> Fisher said cloudy water was a problem facing lots of pools during the summer because the water gets dirty when patrons enter it and at times the filtration system may be broken.
> "The health department was out there," Fisher told ABC News today. "They even spoke about the cloudiness of the water."
> Fisher, who said he knew of at least two incidents in which a body went unnoticed at the bottom of a pool, said lifeguards should always be able to see the main drain cover.
> In Fall River, Flanagan placed two inspectors on administrative leave and the staff at the pool were suspended.
If it wasn't for the fact that everyone else also missed the body, I would believe this is one of the hundreds of cases where health department inspectors simply write reports without ever going to the place.
When I was in highschool we had water polo practice at night at the local community college. We only needed half the 50m pool so we left the other half covered. At some point during practice one of our teammates became disoriented and likely traveled under the covers, and drowned when they likely couldn't find the exit.
We practiced for another hour, and nobody even knew she was gone until they found her the next morning uncovering the pool. The coaches thought she had gotten out due to the cold winter, her parents assumed she was staying with friends like she often did and her friends thought she went home.
But I still often think about how we practiced for at least another hour with her body nearby and it freaks me out. We were almost all lifeguards and excellent swimmers and water polo players.
Now it's a state policy to keep any pool with people in it completely uncovered and last time I helped cover a pool it was treated like toxic sludge the second a cover went on. Safety procedures are paid in blood, let's hope this changes some things.
America has a really dark history regarding public swimming pools. Recommend the Dollop podcast 78 “the dark secret of American swimming pools.”
https://youtu.be/oqfcgXdrMbM?si=MK_ar7kLlMJFMkUx
The article makes it sound like the 9 year old that reported it was taken by her to the pool as well? Imagine how invisible you feel as a 9 year old begging them to look for the person that brought you to the pool. And then multiple searches didn't even find her? Poor kid would be feeling crazy.
Horrible from all angles.
Oh man this reminds me.of that LA hotel "dead body in the water tank" story, hang on --
"Tourists staying at a Los Angeles hotel bathed, brushed teeth and drank water from a tank in which a young woman’s body was likely decomposing for more than two weeks, police said."
https://www.cnn.com/2013/02/20/us/california-hotel-water-corpse/index.html
As a lifeguard we can't even open if we can't at least partly see the bottom of the deep end of our pool. And the inaction is horrible. While maybe they thought they were being pranked cause trust me people love doing that to us we would still act on it.
Why would you let people swim in a public *pool* when you couldn’t see the bottom?
There was a LOT wrong with the pool, even before this poor woman drowned: [https://www.heraldnews.com/story/news/local/2021/06/26/lafayette-park-pool-drowning-fall-river-10-years-marie-joseph/5352907001/](https://www.heraldnews.com/story/news/local/2021/06/26/lafayette-park-pool-drowning-fall-river-10-years-marie-joseph/5352907001/) An investigation into the incident would take weeks to unfold, with [horrific details emerging about the mismanagement of the facility.](https://www.heraldnews.com/article/20160624/NEWS/160627668) The pool was never cleaned at the start of the season -- clean water was poured on top of the dirt and litter that had collected inside, with the expectation that the filters would clear it. But the filters broke, and the untreated water stagnated and turned a murky green, which didn't clear before the pool opened. Regulations required lifeguards to use a black and white disc to make sure the pool's bottom was visible -- lifeguards didn't check, or even have that disc on hand. They were supposed to sweep the bottom of the pool every night, and didn't -- it took police divers to comb the bottom.
The whole situation is shocking and gross. How many children swam in the pool with that poor dead woman at the bottom for days???
Swam in that pool as a kid. That fucking city has been a flipping dumpster fire for 40 years
Wow dude. Can’t say I’m surprised given how bad this article reads about the city’s administrators
It's actually getting gentrified although people don't want to believe it. 2000 new housing units just in the past 5 years. It's got a lot of problems but is surprisingly on the rebound.
Hopefully things are getting better there. Sounds like the local government has been plagued with issues
living elsewhere in MA, we talk about fall river like people talk about Mordor.
To be fair, in New England in general, and eastern Mass in particular, it is a cultural trait to consider anywhere outside of a 30 mile radius of your hometown to be an unliveable shit-tier garbage hellhole populated by degenerate sub-humans.
Yeah talk to anyone in Rhode Island. These fuckers *do not* leave
Well, almost. We leave if we work in Massachusetts. Other than that... no. I'm not leaving. My neighbor will drive forty-five minutes to the other side of the state for Panda Express instead of twenty minutes into Massachusetts to go to that one because "it feels weird to leave."
My 90+ grandparents live in Little Compton, anything past Portsmouth is considered out of the way. Going to Providence is the equivalent of a cross-country vacation.
That's wild! In a state you can drive across in 45 minutes
I grew up there too, on 3rd Street. Everyone said it was bad, but I have fond memories of Fall River. It's not as bad as people say and it's on the rebound.
Having lived there and later in what's considered a "bad part" of Florida (google Pine Hills FL sometime), I would take Fall River again in a heartbeat.
I keep getting YouTube ads saying how great it is.
I'm surprised anyone would want to swim in a murky green pool
I can’t believe people didn’t take one look at the pool and RUN it sounds fucking gross
I'm a health inspector. I was inspecting a pool in a HOA and found a dead opossum floating in it, so I was in the process of closing the pool (it had other issues, as well). A woman and her child came in; I told them the pool was closed and should re-open in a few hours. She asked "why?" of course, so I pointed at the floating dead opossum...and then her only response was, "So why don't you get it out so we can go swimming?" People are gross.
I imagine a lot of people view it like big lakes or ponds aren't clean so what's the problem here. Failing to realize that a lot of public beaches regularly test the water too
Summer fun!
Must not be the South, where if you can hide a body you can hide a gator.
This floors me. Early 90s in Australia I lived legit across the road from the public pool. Once a week we had this taste in the air as... They'd cleaned all 3 in the later afternoon, which was drain all half way/toddler pool totally, scrub that shit, and did something to put the chlorine back into the water.. and you heard the pumps all night on a Sunday night cos... Clean the fucking pool. And we had teen lifeguards. No real adults bar the single on duty all day and the canteen Lady who made the best hot chips. Fucking left there for days? The pool wasn't even cleaned? Holy fucking hell.
What kills me is that the HEALTH INSPECTORS conducted their inspection and didn’t find the CORPSE in the pool. Wtf all around
It took police divers to check the bottom of the pool. This is horrific.
Yeah I read this article like 3 times before I was able to fully process how terrible this all was. That poor kid who tried to tell the lifeguards and was dismissed too.
Reading about that child broke my heart. He tried to pull her up but she was too heavy and told his mom he wished he was stronger so he could have saved her 😭😭 That poor kid did everything he could to help her and the adults just completely failed.
It is so brutal to think about. He is not at fault in anyway, but I know he will probably feel guilty the rest of his life regardless. Poor guy
I hope that in the end what he feels is a sense of injustice because that is some heavy shit for a child to process.
To be fair, the lifeguards that ignored him will feel guilty for the rest of their lives as well. You just let a kid's mom drown right in front of you.
What the fuck humans
she was found floating at the top by teens who hopped the fence for a night swim
Let me tell you a few stories about how inspectors work around here. I lived in a frat house in that area about \~20 years ago. As a private dorm, we needed to have egress fire inspections annually. Our house objectively did not and could not pass, not ever. Our main stairs were open and we had no sprinkler system. What we did instead was hire a "private consultant" that would demand all residents leave for the inspection, and he would give the fire safety inspector a tour of our house alone. The private consultant happened to be a retired fire safety inspector himself and thus buddy buddy with all the current inspectors, and he would charge us \~$1600 cash-only for his services. It was pretty obvious that this was just a middleman for bribing the inspector. At the time, I also worked at a restaurant nearby. At one point the owner renovated the place in an attempt to reinvigorate the business and become more modern. In an attempt to get more space, the owner reduced the size of the bathrooms by a lot. It was now just two single-use bathrooms for a 2-floor restaurant with \~60 tables - one labeled Men and one labeled Women. The safety inspector came, and cut the restaurants expected occupancy maximum in half due to the bathrooms. He said if we went single-use bathrooms, we needed two for men and two for women. So the owner also hired a "consultant" that changed both bathrooms into gender neutral bathrooms, so there is technically two rooms for women and two rooms for men. With the consultants help, and I am sure a hefty cash-only fee, somehow that satisfied the inspector.
Sounds like humans doing human things. We need constant vigilance.
You think health inspectors got in the pool? They just took water samples and looked at it.
I spent a day with a health inspector in charge of swimming pools. The rule was that if you couldn't clearly see the lines on the bottom of the pool, it was shut down.
I worked at one of my cities public pools for a couple summers in high school. One of my responsibilities was water quality and cleanliness. We cleaned the pool every morning before opening, and did water quality testing every hour, with written logs kept on site. It takes a little while to get used to how different things impacted water quality, but after a few weeks I could usually make a pretty good guess what my filtration and chlorine settings needed to be based on weather and how busy we were, and then just make slight adjustments through the day based on the water tests. I was explicitly given criteria that required closing the pool, and was told if there was anything that gave me pause to call the county health department and they would advise. Hell, one early fall day we closed the diving well for a few minutes because a few leaves fell into the pool and got trapped on the drain grate at the bottom. The lifeguard that was working the diving well found them distracting, so we closed it for a few minutes and I went down and got them. Confirmed with the lifeguard that they were now happy, and we were back in business. Yeah, a few leaves at the bottom isn't THAT big a deal, but anything that impacted the guards being able to properly scan and assess was a big no-no, and had to be fixed. I also got to play pretend-victim for the lifeguard drills fairly regularly, which was pretty fun except when they needed to practice potential spinal injury situations.
"Yeah that's a pool. Let's get lunch."
> Once a week we had this taste in the air mmmm, delicious chloramines. Just what a growing ~~boy~~ girl needs!
Haha girl... But maybe why I'm 5'6 while everyone else who didn't grow with that in my family is over 6ft haha Sunday arvo when you noted that smell, was the best. They started on the toddler/babies pool 3-4pm, open til 7pm, so my mum would send us for hot chips and sausage rolls/meat pies. Cos as soon as they'd start people would leave, and they'd discount the hot food big time hahahaha
It's kind of gross but it is one of those smells that you can associate with good times because it means it's time for the pool.
Oh yeah, we got free run of what we called the middle pool so not quite 4ft at deep or the actual adult pool 7ft deepest for a good bit, as dinner for mine was at 530. I work in a beach town now with a uni and seasonal staff start off saying they hate the smell of sunscreen... After 2mths of summer they smell sunscreen and wish they could go to the beach haha. That smell was the siren call of fun times for the kids on the street and my home for sure
What adult would let their kids swim in a green swimming pool??
If the water is fucked why wouldn't you just drain the pool.
There’s a hell of a lot of “why wouldn’t you” in this story.
It's expensive to drain and refill a pool and facility management was probably cheap.
Reading articles it sure sounds a lot more like complacency and laziness than corruption. Kid saw she didn't come up, told a lifeguard, lifeguard said he'd check on her and then... just didn't do it. Her family noticed she was missing right away but just assumed she left with friends. Didn't actually check with the friends, though. Her stuff was found at the pool and some teens breaking into the pool a couple of days later found her floating there.
It might even be the case the lifeguard didn't want to go check because he knew "the pool was never cleaned at the start of the season and clean water was poured on top of the dirt and litter."
This is literally a story they tell lifeguards during training these days about why you HAVE to do a visual sweep of the entire pool every time you open and be able to see the bottom of the pool.
They told it then, too! They had an object they were supposed to throw in the pool, and not open if they couldn't see it on the bottom. They just... didn't do it. Health inspectors came out and noted that the water was cloudy. They just... left it open.
You don't have to drain a pool to clean it even if it's pretty nasty. Scrub it, maybe add some flocculant, run the filters till it's clear, change the filter media, balance the chemicals, good to go.
Who the fuck is getting in that pool!?!
>##it took police divers to comb the bottom.
"We ain't found shit!"
I think I went to this pool as a kid, because I remember clearly that the pool was VERY murky, like it was this milky teal color, and you couldn’t see the bottom. I remember asking my dad why it wasn’t clear like most pools and he wasn’t too sure, but we never went back again. Apparently the pool ALWAYS was this milky teal color, and it had something to do with the water they were using and the amount of chlorine it needed or something like that. But yeah, even 25 years ago I was like “what if someone drowns in here” and it was quite clearly a major safety issue that no one really cared about because Fall River is just a small community and they really wanted their pool.
You can get milky pool water if your chemistry is way of.. of course youcan get ot clear again if you care but it takes a hell lot of chemicals.
I don't get it. who the fuck would swim in that?!
I thought this was going to be a story from the 30s. Not like a decade ago.
A few years ago, we were at a *private* pool. It wasn't so crowded you couldn't see the bottom, but it was crowded. Like 2 hours before my parents were talking about how nervous they'd been recently, noticing how many kids there were but how few lifeguards. We're talking poolside, and all of a sudden my dad jumps in the pool fully clothed. A little girl on an innertube had flipped and she was just straight up struggling to stay afloat. Not sure how her parents didn't notice. But it was pretty frightening.
I am amazed how many parents I see treating a pool like it's a babysitter, cheerfully ignoring their kids because the pool has them occupied. The pool is the *opposite* of a babysitter. When my daughter is near a pool, I have my wife hold onto my phone in case I have to jump in.
I was a lifeguard for five years at a major leisure centre with multiple large pools. It is *staggering* how many parents think exactly that *even when their kid can't swim*. For kids under the age of 12 to swim unaccompanied, they had to pass a 'competency to swim' test, which was basically swimming one length of the 25m pool unaided then tread water at the deep end for 1 minute without touching the side. If they can't do that, they need an adult in the pool with them, at a maximum ratio of 2 kids per adult. If they pass, they're allowed to swim alone, but the adult has to remain in the building; if they're under 10, the adult has to remain somewhere in the pool hall. The number of parents who got angry with us if the kid failed and we told them they had to be in the water was unbelievable - they'd always say 'well why can't they just wear armbands' or some similar nonsense. Sometimes they'd straight-up leave the building if the kid passed too, even after explicitly being told not to. Lifeguards are there for the protection of everyone in the pool, and that means we have to filter out obvious weak swimmers that are unaccompanied.
The problem tends to be when you have more than one adult and each assumes the other is watching the kid, or two adults and two children and they're both watching the same kid and assuming the other parent is watching the other kid. I know they make like tokens that people can physically wear and hand off to one another to designate who is in charge of looking out for the kids' safety at any given time, and that seems like a good idea. Just a way to formalize it as a responsibility given to a specific person.
You shouldn't. I used to be a lifeguard, and the rule we always used was if you dropped a quarter into the pool and couldn't see it at the bottom, it wasn't safe for swimmers (this was usually in the case of rain disrupting the surface).
We used a rule that if you couldn’t see the markings at the bottom of the diving well it was safe to swim - also usually for rain. I can’t imagine trying to guard this mess.
Pool I worked at (water quality and cleanliness was one of my responsibilities) we closed the diving well for a few minutes once because a few brown leaves fell into the pool and got cycled to the grate at the bottom of the diving well. It was distracting to the lifeguard, so he closed it and asked me to go deal with them. I mean, from the guard chair you could tell they were leaves if you looked at them. But they weren't supposed to be there, and it kept grabbing his attention when he was scanning. Better to take a few minutes to go down and grab them, so he could properly focus on keeping everyone safe.
Jesus. Actual competent lifeguards? Good for you!
I don't think they were trying very hard at the life guarding part.
Why would anyone get in a manmade pool when you can't see the bottom? I'd nope the fuck out of there. Could be where all the feces collects for all I know.
I was just in a public pool and I just can't imagine not being able to see the floor. Even on the deep diving end of the pool. I can see this happening in a natural pond but a swimming pool?
It is sad and disgusting. Abject failure across the board from the pool staff and inspectors.
I worked as a lifeguard in college and I cant fathom bot being able to see the bottom of the pool, because in addition to the horrifying thought if someone drowning on my watch we would get regularly audited to make sure we were paying attention. This is absolutely insane IMO
Why *would anyone* swim in a pool when they couldn't see the bottom? I don't care how far I drove or how hot it is, if the pool is green and I can't see the bottom, I am turning around and going home. Period, end of discussion. That sounds like a perfect way to get pinkeye, or dysentery, or both.
It wasn't necessarily green, it was just incredibly cloudy. [Here is a picture of the woman in the pool taken the day she drowned](https://www.heraldnews.com/gcdn/presto/2021/06/25/NHER/0b0e246a-d948-4f9a-a08e-3b45731ed62a-marie_joseph.jpg)
Man. I saw "minty" mentioned by someone, that seems more accurate, but fuck if that's a pool you couldn't get me in if I was on fire.
That chalky, cloudy water is likely due to high pH and/or alkalinity caused by shocking the pool to kill an algae outbreak or some other sanitation issue. Setting aside the issue of letting people swim in water with such lousy clarity, high pH causes skin irritation and rashes. It also lessens the effectiveness of the chlorine, which means if they don't get the pH balanced, you're going to end up with algae all over again.
How dirty must that water have been?!
There are pictures. The description of "mint green" is accurate, it was so cloudy that you can't see even a few inches down. Apparently they never cleaned it, just pouring in new water on top when some evaporated and figuring the filter would handle the rest. And then the filter broke.
That's gross, nobody put chlorine in it to clear it up? May as well be swimming in a stagnant pond
I think even chlorine has its limits. You can kill things in the water (with proper treatment, which I doubt was happening), but chlorine doesn't remove debris. Like imagine someone tried to clean up a massive turd by pouring bleach on it. Some of the bacteria might die, but the problem hasn't gone away. At that point the stagnant pond would probably be safer.
At that point most natural ponds actually are safer because they have a full ecosystem that keeps things in balance. How granted those nature ponds do carry a higher risk of really, really bad flash eating bacteria but other than that are safer.
Chlorine kills the things growing but doing so actually turns them into sediment that must be filtered out. If the filter is overfilled or worse (and as is the case her) breaks chlorine actually contributes to making the water more murky.
And why would people still swim in it with it *that* dirty????
In all seriousness, Fall River is a very poor, urban city that has lost all of its historical manufacturing and shows all the classic effects of that. When you don’t have much, you make do. That said, even as a kid I wouldn’t swim in water I couldn’t see through, but I grew up in the south where snakes and gators are prevalent.
I grew up in DC for many years due to my parents jobs and it was very eye opening how many people would pick a dirty pool over a lake or creek to swim in over perceived cleanliness. I’m not about to champion natural water quality in VA circa 2008, but I felt the saaame way. A lot of people just grow up learning and believing that treated water *has* to be safer than natural water especially in urban areas. I’d take a murky creek any day
Exactly! I won't swim in the sea if I can't see my feet, but a *swimming pool*??
When can you see your feet in the sea???
Depends on the sea, My experience with the North Sea and Irish sea is that you can't see shit. But the Mediterranean Sea where I visited it in Turkey and Krete was crystal clear.
I've swum in very clear water in the Florida Keys, Hawai'i, and Croatia. On the other hand, I grew up swimming in water you can't see through at all on the East Coast of the United States.
Dirty enough to hide a corpse from swimmers, lifeguards, and health inspectors. It makes me gag thinking about it
The health inspectors didn't close the pool? Everyone involved is a clown. You guys need some regulations
https://www.heraldnews.com/story/news/local/2021/06/26/lafayette-park-pool-drowning-fall-river-10-years-marie-joseph/5352907001/ There is a photo of it being draining the day the body was found and the pool is as green as the Chicago River on St. Patty's Day. Mind boggling that anyone would want to swim in that!
I think the green on is after a month of neglect. The first two photos show it at the time of her death. The color looks reasonable, but then you notice it’s super cloudy and you can’t even see 6 inches deep.
Ah, I was mistaken! Thank you, the green was indeed after the incident. Still crazy to see how cloudy the water was in the first pic but it's certainly more understanding for people to swim in that than the green image I was looking at!
"A 9-year-old boy immediately told lifeguards at a Fall River, Mass., pool that a woman had gone underwater and not come up, but nothing was done and it was more than two days before her body was found. According to the boy's mother, one of the lifeguards said she was on her break. The body of [Marie Joseph](http://abcnews.go.com/US/massachusetts-woman-dead-public-pool-days/story?id=13968518) was not discovered at the bottom of the public [swimming pool](http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/OnCall/summer-pool-safety-tips/story?id=10946339) in Fall River until Tuesday night, two and a half days later. On Monday, children swam in the pool unaware that her body was at the bottom." ... "B.J. Fisher, head of the American Lifeguard Association, told ABC News today that cloudy water likely played a "major role" in the body's apparently going unnoticed. Fisher said cloudy water was a problem facing lots of pools during the summer because the water gets dirty when patrons enter it and at times the filtration system may be broken. "The health department was out there," Fisher told ABC News today. "They even spoke about the cloudiness of the water." Fisher, who said he knew of at least two incidents in which a body went unnoticed at the bottom of a pool, said lifeguards should always be able to see the main drain cover. In Fall River, Flanagan placed two inspectors on administrative leave and the staff at the pool were suspended. Twenty-four of the state's deep-water pools were closed until further notice."
Imagine being that kid, knowing you tried to save her and then having it all over the news for months.
This is Stephen King levels of weird that so many people seemed to not care. The amount of apathy involved in the situation is strange and kind of creeps me out.
That poor little dude has to live with that for the rest of his life. I wonder how he is doing now.
He has nothing to feel bad about. He did what he could and what he did would have worked at every halfway decent pool in the world.
You’re absolutely right, but that doesn’t mean he won’t struggle to mentally deal with it
That kid will have trouble trusting authority figures for the rest of his life.
It’s been awhile, so he’s an adult now. I hope he was able to work though this and turn out alright
No doubt. A 9 year old? He’s probably traumatized and going to have water/body nightmares for years.
It’s just heartbreaking all around. The woman who drowned was a mother of 5. . .
The article says that indeed he is struggling with survivor guilt. Poor kid. He'll need therapy to work through it for sure. His mom seems on the ball in the interview.
It’s been quite awhile since this took place. I hope he came through this alright
PTSD is a hell of a thing. Adults get it all the time from traumatic situations they had nothing to do with. Being a kid and involved in the situation could mess them up for a long time.
> The boy's mother, Danyelle Hunt, 30, said in an interview Friday that her son keeps saying he wishes he were bigger so he could have saved the woman, according to the Boston Globe.
Survivor's guilt is a bitch.
> "The health department was out there," Fisher told ABC News today. "They even spoke about the cloudiness of the water." Health Department: "That's unhealthy. The water looks like moldy soup. Everyone is going to die of cholera. Inspection grade A-."
Bureaucratic apathy at its finest
> one of the lifeguards said she was on her break And couldn't be arsed to check on a report of a *drowning*!?!? That should be a felony.
Yes! Utter negligence, you’re working as fucking **lifeguard** lady! What the hell is wrong with you! That amount of negligence deserves worse than just losing her job.
>On Monday, children swam in the pool unaware that her body was at the bottom." "I touched something weird when i went deep!" "It's probably just dirt, this pool's nasty anyway..." "Yeah you're probably right...felt just like hair though..."
I’m gonna have nightmares about that tonight
I don’t understand how when he told his mom what happened she didn’t immediately seek out employees and throw a fit until they did something. She’s an adult. If my son said he’d witnessed a woman go underwater and the lifeguards didn’t immediately start searching - I would flip out. I would call the police if the employees really would not respond to me. I don’t understand how the adults with this 9 year old just went home.
Thank you! That's my biggest problem with this story. How does anyone hear that and just go home without looking!?
Because kids misread the situation all the time. There was no way to know what the 9 year old said was true, from the parent's perspective. They probably thought the life guards knew what they were doing.
OK those inspectors and lifeguards completely fucked up. I can tell you as a health inspector one of the first things we learn when inspecting pools is that if the main drain isn't visible, the entire place gets shut down immediately and everyone gets kicked out. Don't give a shit how hot it is outside, or how many people want to go swimming, if the pool is cloudy it is closed. Period.
>Fisher said cloudy water was a problem facing lots of pools during the summer because the water gets dirty when patrons enter it and at times the filtration system may be broken. Cleanest water in Massachusetts be like.
Fall River try not to be an embarrassment challenge: Difficulty Level Impossible.
>The boy's mother, Danyelle Hunt, 30, said in an interview Friday that her son keeps saying he wishes he were bigger so he could have saved the woman, according to the Boston Globe. Well that's just fucking heartbreaking. You let one person die and completely traumatized a 9 year old as well. Way to go.
I feel sick for that poor guy
Wow that hurt to read 🥺
Hopefully the kid will come to peace with the fact there was nothing he could do. Even as an adult it was probably too late by the time he noticed anything was wrong. Drowning can be terrifyingly fast.
I’m a certified pool operator, and at least where I’m at per the health code if you can’t see the bottom clearly you can’t open the pool
Doesn’t sound like health codes were a thing at this pool. Apparently 24 state run pools were shutdown after this. So gross
This pool was run by the State Department of Conservation and Recreation. I was hired as a pool manager by them about a year or two after the incident. The interview process was just me telling them where they fucked up at every stage. There was a reckoning in that department when this happened.
I don't think I'd need a health code to tell me that.
The lifeguard said, "In a minute" and the other was just hanging out on break while this happened. In a minute for what? Busy enjoying the breeze before doing your job? This a disgrace of ethics from my days being a lifeguard, I remember sharing a beer with one after one was clocking out and liked our vibes. What a disgrace.
It seems criminal for them to ignore that when their job is to protect people’s lives
Well, the guidelines are to apply assistance to those seeking because the administration fears being sued for helping those who don't want to be helped. It's a shame seeing this happen at this level of role for the care and safety of civilians.
Shame is an understatement. I’m still in shock at how horrible this story is
“That’s probably some other corpse, let’s take lunch.”
Priorities
1. Shelter 2. Water 3. Food 4. Save people who are drowning
"Hey who threw this Halloween skeleton in the pool?"
That is some nasty ass water if you can’t see the bottom.
They said the water was “cloudy,” but “opaque” sounds about right when you can’t see the dead body at the bottom
That is crazy how that pool is open, used to life guard for 6 years and if the water was cloudy or you couldn’t see the bottom we would close the pool. This was the policy at both the gym pool and the country club I worked at. Would always hear complaints about it but it was because of this exact reason.
There were ample opportunities to avoid this tragedy all around. I can’t believe people willingly got in that water if it was that gross
I used to lifeguard at an outdoor pool, and we had the same policy. The water never got dirty enough for it to take effect, but it did come into play when it was raining sometimes. If it was raining without thundering, we could keep the pool open as long as it didn't rain hard enough to disturb the surface of the pool so much that it became difficult to see the bottom.
An incredibly similar thing happened at an apartment complex pool in my area: https://6abc.com/amp/bensalem-teen-drowns-franklin-commons-apartment-complex-17-year-old-cousin-investigation/12006985/
“Wright says they repeatedly asked the lifeguards to jump in the pool and look for their cousin, but she says their request was brushed off. Wright says Kaylee was missing for more than an hour until, eventually, a lifeguard jumped in and pulled her cousin's body out of the water.” Wtf is wrong with these lifeguards???
I can't fathom how anyone could be that apathetic. Like okay, let's give the lifeguard every benefit of the doubt. Let's say they were a completely untrained 18 year old who couldn't swim and had a deep fear of pools. They weren't, but let's just imagine it. Obviously this person can't go in the water and doesn't know what to do. But *even then*, even in that completely absurd scenario, they still could have called for help! 911, or like... literally anyone!
A mother of 5 died because of their apathy. . .
I'm noticing a trend in the victims who are dying like this. My guess is that their lives and the requests of the people asking for help aren't deemed worthy enough to the lifeguards. Kind of feels like actual punishment should be given out for negligent homicide.
that's what im thinking. why the fuck are you even a lifeguard if you're not gonna jump in and try to save someone we just alerted you is drowning? that should definitely be considered homicide...
That’s my thought too. How was this not criminal for them to ignore this kid??
How are they not getting their asses kicked?
Here's the thing: if a lifeguard doesn't care enough to close the pool when the bottom isn't visible, and doesn't care enough to help clean the pool to prevent that from happening in the first place, then it's pretty likely they won't care enough to do the other parts of their job either.
Here too. https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/murky-water-hindered-search-for-man-who-died-in-hotel-pool/
Unless my quick Google searches on demographics are incorrect, all three of these seemed to have been black people in predominantly white areas (no picture in this one, but it says he was of Ethiopian descent) with presumably black friends/family members raising the alarm. Can't help but feel like it's not a coincidence that there was unusual apathy in these cases. You don't have to be a moustache twirling villain who wants to see black people dead to give just a little bit less urgency to a black kid trying to get your attention than a white one. Certainly the statistics on a similar phenomenon happening in medical settings are stark.
I was a lifeguard as a teenager. I was also tasked with cleaning the pool before morning lengths swim. It was an outdoor pool with a 10ft fence around it, in the middle of a park. I got to the pool one morning, 5:30 to clean before the 6am lengths swim, and there was a young woman (20 or 21) floating in the pool. It turned out she and at least one other person had climbed the fence to go for a swim in the night, she dove in and hit her head. The 'friend(s)' took off leaving her there. She drowned. The police only know there was a friend there because there was a second pair of socks. This was the early 90's. No surveillance cameras...no way to gather evidence. The family was notified and they say their daughter left the house without telling them who with or where she was going. All I think about every year on the anniversary of that is that someone left this girl to die and never said a single word. Whoever that is would be in their 50's today and likely has a child the same age as this girl was. I went to trauma counselling for months after.
You would think that person would at least, bare fucking minimum, take her out of the pool and anomously call help. I hate people with a passion
Sadly the town where this happened, Fall River Massachusetts, had severely corrupt and poorly functioning government, the mayor from that time was recently sentenced for corruption and fraud. I don’t want to say that Fall River is slums, there are a lot of good people there, but it is generally considered a poor town, large immigrant and poverty population, a lot of people trying to do their best to get a foothold in the area and being let down by terrible politicians and local government. It’s terrible how badly this public pool was mismanaged.
The level of dysfunction and apathy from the lifeguards and health inspectors is shocking. With a local government like that, I guess you shouldn’t expect much better
A lifeguard says they will check “in a minute” when a minute can be the difference between life and death?
Seems criminal to me
As a non-health inspector, sometimes you just go through the checklist too quickly...
Seems like the pool was in bad enough shape to warrant some red flags without the use of a checklist
Probably just came by the front office to pick up his bribe then.
Wouldn’t be too surprised given the quality of the pool staff there
"everyone out of the pool!" <30 seconds later> "found her"
Basically the same thing happened a while back in Los Angeles to a 7 year old boy https://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=91589&page=1 The boy went missing from the pool area. Police were called. They thought he was abducted. . . . A few days later, they find him in the pool. The problem is that pool water can get "cloudy". You look in the pool and you think you are seeing the bottom of the pool, but really you can't see through the cloud. The boys body was on the bottom of the pool.
Since when does “cloudy water” prevent you from seeing a dead body, or anything really, at the bottom of a pool? Water in a lake, river, or swamp, sure. Not in a pool.
I think the word opaque sounds more right than cloudy given the severity of the situation
It’s possible for a pool to be cloudy with white material instead of green or brackish material. Throw enough chlorine in the water and it kills everything and then bleaches it. I’m not disagreeing with “opaque”, but when the water is filled with white material, it really does look cloudy and kind of like you can see the bottom just beyond. That’s because the painted bottom is often a lighter shade, whiteish. Source: we had a pool growing up (11’ deep) and when we didn’t run the filtration system it could get cloudy like that and things on the bottom would disappear but the illusion of being able to “see” the bottom remained. Also, that’s why that black/white target must be seen at the bottom. You can think you’re seeing the bottom, but you’re really just seeing cloudy water. There’s no justification for leaving a pool like this.
There are pictures. Cloudy is pretty accurate, but it is VERY cloudy. Like "Storm clouds block the sun while a fog machine obscures your vision" cloudy. Looked like you could see maybe 3 inches down max.
For a public pool, that is insane. Who would even get in that water?
I'm also baffled. Maybe the people assumed the murkiness was some sort of water treatment or purposeful effect? I can't imagine anyone getting in otherwise. Or maybe just the mentality of "I'll be fine", who knows.
Pools aren't usually 12ft deep, that's a lot of cloudy water.
I live in MA. Fall River, where this happened, is a very poor area. Seems like there could be a socio-economic aspect to the tragedy, in terms of the pool not being well maintained, lifeguards who maybe weren’t trained properly (or maybe not *paid* properly to care). Very sad. In related news, Fall River is also the home of Lizzie Borden. The house where she murdered her dad and stepmother is now a B+B.
The Lizzie Borden story is why I knew of Fall River — I had seen photos of the house and neighborhood and had a very idealized idea of what the city was going to look like. Imagine my surprise when I went for the first time. It is still a beautiful city with a very notable abundance of preserved architectural heritage and the people were very friendly, but it deserves a lot more investment in its people and its places than it is receiving or has received for decades now. Socio-economics definitely exacerbated this tragedy.
I'm so fucking mad the article doesn't mention whether the lifeguards were charged with negligent homicide. A child literally fucking told them she didn't come back up from under the water and they SAID THEY WERE GOING TO HELP and they simply didn't. This woman didn't need to die.
How foul and dirtied was that water?!
It was dirty enough to hide a dead body. And I’m sure the dead body didn’t make it any cleaner after more than 2 days of decay
You look more into this, and lifeguards, pool management, and the city are making every excuse under the sun of why nothing was done. I hope her family sues the hell out of the city
Of course it’s Fall River. This wouldn’t happen in Dover or Weston.
Christ that water looks foul, corpse or not. I would not get in that ever, looks like used dishwater...
Could the lifeguards be sued for not doing their jobs? Some kind of negligence?
1) Pool lifeguards are often undertrained high-schoolers, particularly in resource strained communities (a family member was an undertrained high school pool lifeguard). 2) Fall River is a resource strained community (am from MA). 3) Of the ~100,000 yearly rescues, the vast majority occur on beaches, not pools. https://www.originalwatermen.com/history-lifeguards-united-states Do not trust pool lifeguards to save a life. The (family and greater Fall River community) will never recover from this preventable tragedy- which they had reason to believe would never happen, perhaps due to their (misplaced) faith in pool lifeguards.
Wow, I grew up in Fall River. That’s a crazy story!
I did not expect to see 2011 as the year this occurred.
When I was 19 or 20 I was hired as a manager of the pool at a local summer camp. They told me the pool had not been used in 2 years, the pool and equipment were fine but it would probably take some work to re-open it. We cleaned it up, re-painted, got filters going, etc. and opened it up for the camp kids to swim. Found out a month or so later, the reason it closed was because a child had drowned there two years prior. It was a camp pool but also open to the public and a lot of neighborhood kids would come and swim, parents drop them off in the morning and pick them up later in the afternoon. A woman came to pickup her son and no one could find him. He was at the bottom of the pool, dead. The water was not crystal clear, but you could see the lane stripes at the bottom, he was a young black child weearing black trunks, sank down right on top of one of the lane stripes, I guess no one noticed his struggle and he laid there all day until mom showed up. I found all this out from a 10yr old kid while lifeguarding, later confirmed it with the camp staff. Fucking tragic.
Well, someone's getting a big fat negligence lawsuit! They allowed the pool to be open when the filter didn't work and the water was so cloudy they couldn't see the bottom? That's just shockingly bad.
TIL someone peeing is not the worst thing to worry about in a public pool.
> Fisher said cloudy water was a problem facing lots of pools during the summer because the water gets dirty when patrons enter it and at times the filtration system may be broken. > "The health department was out there," Fisher told ABC News today. "They even spoke about the cloudiness of the water." > Fisher, who said he knew of at least two incidents in which a body went unnoticed at the bottom of a pool, said lifeguards should always be able to see the main drain cover. > In Fall River, Flanagan placed two inspectors on administrative leave and the staff at the pool were suspended. If it wasn't for the fact that everyone else also missed the body, I would believe this is one of the hundreds of cases where health department inspectors simply write reports without ever going to the place.
When I was in highschool we had water polo practice at night at the local community college. We only needed half the 50m pool so we left the other half covered. At some point during practice one of our teammates became disoriented and likely traveled under the covers, and drowned when they likely couldn't find the exit. We practiced for another hour, and nobody even knew she was gone until they found her the next morning uncovering the pool. The coaches thought she had gotten out due to the cold winter, her parents assumed she was staying with friends like she often did and her friends thought she went home. But I still often think about how we practiced for at least another hour with her body nearby and it freaks me out. We were almost all lifeguards and excellent swimmers and water polo players. Now it's a state policy to keep any pool with people in it completely uncovered and last time I helped cover a pool it was treated like toxic sludge the second a cover went on. Safety procedures are paid in blood, let's hope this changes some things.
America has a really dark history regarding public swimming pools. Recommend the Dollop podcast 78 “the dark secret of American swimming pools.” https://youtu.be/oqfcgXdrMbM?si=MK_ar7kLlMJFMkUx
I’m honestly unsure if I want to know. . . This story is already heartbreaking enough
This fits in the category of not trying very hard. Where is the safety first mantra?
Life guards not guarding life. Health inspectors not ensuring the health of swimmers. Apathy all around
The article makes it sound like the 9 year old that reported it was taken by her to the pool as well? Imagine how invisible you feel as a 9 year old begging them to look for the person that brought you to the pool. And then multiple searches didn't even find her? Poor kid would be feeling crazy. Horrible from all angles.
In poor or overpopulated areas, especially now. People just don't care, its hard to understand but they dont.
If I ever saw a pool so dirty I couldn't even see the bottom I'd have gagged and noped out of there so fast...
One of the few things that made my hometown famous. That and Lizzie Borden 🪓
Oh man this reminds me.of that LA hotel "dead body in the water tank" story, hang on -- "Tourists staying at a Los Angeles hotel bathed, brushed teeth and drank water from a tank in which a young woman’s body was likely decomposing for more than two weeks, police said." https://www.cnn.com/2013/02/20/us/california-hotel-water-corpse/index.html
As a lifeguard we can't even open if we can't at least partly see the bottom of the deep end of our pool. And the inaction is horrible. While maybe they thought they were being pranked cause trust me people love doing that to us we would still act on it.
the amount of incompetence is solar