Someone Pooped in the Pool! (Or did they?)

In the movie Caddyshack, someone throws a candybar into a swimming pool as a joke. Naturally, everyone freaks out because they think someone has pooped in the pool!

And this sort of thing does happen in real life. (And not with a candy bar!) Why do people panic when this happens? If the pool has chlorine in it, the chemicals almost certainly kill the bad germs in the poop. But that doesn’t really matter…somehow, one poop in the pool turns the whole thing into a toilet bowl, and who wants to swim in a toilet bowl? Anyway, this all comes to mind because of this article:

Wow, a hundred people ran screaming to the exit! (Or swam screaming to the ladder.) The pool itself is in England, and I salute the reporter for using the following words in it: poo, faeces (what Americans call “feces”), material, human waste, small solid item, matter. Here’s the most astounding thing about the whole thing:

“A member of staff retrieved a small solid item from the shallow end of the pool and following an inspection of the entire facility nothing else was found, meaning the pool then re-opened for business as usual. The Observer [the name of the newspaper] understands that the solidity of the matter dictates procedure.”

In other words, if the poo is rock hard, the pool operators fish it out…but if it’s more like diarrhea, they drain the pool. I guess that makes sense. It’s hard to clean diarrhea out of the pool with a net!

BTW, in Caddyshack, Bill Murray fishes the candy bar out of the pool, stares at it, and then takes a bite. This causes more screaming...and fainting!

"Swimming Poo" photo by killaclause.