From Channel Five–troubling revelations. From Oak Park–charges of treachery.
“NBC and the BGA took a potentially good public service story and made it a farce,” a village publicist writes us.
Publicist Karen Kelly declares, “But the sleaziest part was the way the pictures for the segment were acquired.”
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Lacking a polio epidemic to make its expose truly boffo, Channel Five spoke in dire generalities of “germs” spreading in underchlorinated water and “ruining any swimmer’s summer fun.” According to the guidelines of the Illinois Department of Public Health, chlorine levels of swimming-pool water belong in the range of 0.5 to 2 parts per million. Channel Five reported that nearly 60 percent of the pools visited by a Unit 5/BGA investigative team failed to meet those guidelines.
And before our horrified eyes, Channel Five showed innocent children frolicking in Ridgeland’s potentially lethal waters on a blazing summer day.
Let’s try to sort the good news from the bad. A 60 percent failure rate–that’s the bad news. The good news is that the bad news–like a six-ounce steak surrounded by boiled potatoes–was made to look much bigger than it was.
So all things considered, we asked Curtis Thompson, the state health department’s program manager for swimming pools, which testing method is more accurate?
The BGA’s Lisa Misher headed up the swimming-pool operation. We asked her why she didn’t use poolside kits. “We’re going to rely on a lab before we rely on ourselves at poolside,” Misher said. “I don’t feel we can post the results of our own poolside tests. I think a pool operator could understandably take issue with that.”
