What feels like years ago but is actually less than 12 months (4 July 2023), the General Manager of Glenorchy City Council abruptly closed the Glenorchy War Memorial Pool to the public until further notice. He has that authority as “person controlling the business or undertaking” under the Work Health and Safety Act 2012. His decision was based on an Inspection and Audit Report from consultants (Lacus Consulting) listing unacceptable risks to the health and safety of pool users, staff and contractors. The public learnt of his decision via a media release.

We’re told that an excessive loss of water was one of the triggers for commissioning the specialist assessment of the pool condition in the first place. While the report from Lacus did confirm “severe water loss in all pools”, it did not quantify or fully explain it.

Despite that, the agenda item (July 2023 Open Council Agenda item 10) gave a specific figure of 35,000 litres per day leaking from the pool, a figure that did not appear in the media release.

The agenda did not explain where that figure came from. And that gave the already angry and upset members of the public an easy target for their invective. Most of us can intuitively understand a leak and how leaks are fixed. Plug a hole, replace the pipe, fix the grout, replace some tiles, replace a washer, etc etc. Simple. No big deal.

It allowed them to virtually ignore all the other genuinely unsafe or dangerous issues at the pool, and focus on the “leaking” despite the fact that it played little or no part in the GM’s decision to close. It has been remarkable how few of the public questions to Council directly related to specific safety or health issues.

The “leaking” is primarily a financial issue, not a safety issue. It is extremely unlikely that the pool would have been closed indefinitely if “leaking” had been the only significant problem.

But it is still not clear whether there is one leak or many, where the water is leaking from and where it is going, and how the leaking can best be stopped or reduced. Council has since explained how it arrived at the 35,000 figure but made a bad mistake in gilding the lily by including it. There are already enough clear and indisputable public health and safety issues to justify closure.