Taking a Swim in a Pool of Danger : Health: A shortage of inspectors helps create conditions in which public swimming facilities become breeding places for bacteria, illness.

Two summers ago, 44 people came down with stomach flu-like symptoms and two were hospitalized after swimming in the parasite-contaminated pool of a San Fernando Valley private school.

The pool at Woodcrest Elementary in Tarzana had not been inspected by county health officials for nearly three years--even though pool operators in Los Angeles County pay an annual fee of $104 for what are supposed to be yearly inspections. It was not until after the swimmers, including members of a high school water polo team, became ill that inspectors discovered the broken filter that allowed the parasite to breed.

Health officials say the case, documented in a U.S. Centers for Disease Control report, demonstrates Los Angeles County’s failure to monitor its 16,700 public pools and spas, most of which are in condominium or apartment complexes. The county, which relies on the pool licensing fees to fund the program, has only eight pool inspectors--the same number as 20 years ago when they inspected half as many pools.

The dearth of inspectors--particularly in the San Fernando Valley where one inspector recently quit, leaving two in the area--means that less than a third of the public pools in the county were checked last year for health and safety violations, such as missing life-rings and contaminated water. Public pools are any that are municipally operated or located at hotels, schools, health clubs or in apartment buildings or condominiums with three or more units.

Although the state recommends that public pools be inspected three times a year, 41% of the pools in Los Angeles County have not been inspected for three or more years, according to county health officials. Thirty percent, or about 5,000 pools, have not been inspected for four or more years.

In contrast, Orange County, which charges pool operators a $179 licensing fee, inspected each of its 6,400 public pools and spas at least three times last year.

“We like to think of public health as a preventive thing, rather than waiting for a disaster to happen,” said Jim Huston, assistant director of environmental health for the Orange County Department of Health Services.

Although inspections are no guarantee against outbreaks like the one at Woodcrest Elementary, they can reveal problems and “if you know an inspector is coming around, there’s a real incentive to do a better job maintaining the pool,” said Anita Highsmith, chief of the water quality laboratory at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.

“The reason that there should be inspections is that every outbreak of swimming-related illness that we and others have investigated has been traced to poor operation and maintenance of pools,” Highsmith said.

Jeff Thornton, aquatics director at Woodcrest, said the pool was tended three times a week by a commercial pool service when the 1988 outbreak occurred. The pool became infected after a toddler who was ill spread the parasite while swimming. Thornton immediately evacuated the pool and treated it with chlorine. However, it turned out that the cryptosporidium parasite that caused the sickness is immune to the chemical, although it can be filtered out.

Unbeknown to the pool service or to school officials, one of the pool’s three filters was not working. The parasite was therefore able to infect swimmers for about a month before county health officials were called and discovered the broken filter, Thornton said.

“I thought everybody was just getting the flu,” Thornton said.

Health officials say they do not know if there have been other major outbreaks of swimming-related illnesses, such as eye infections and gastrointestinal parasites, in Los Angeles County as a result of the lack of inspections.

“There certainly is potential for illness and other problems in inadequately maintained pools,” said Dave Quinton, an environmental health specialist for the state Department of Health Services. “And the longer you don’t do inspections, the greater the risk.”

Local health officials say that in recent years they have been getting complaints about so-called “dark” pools, ones that are so overgrown with algae that a drowning swimmer could not be seen beneath the muck.

For six weeks this summer, a group of tenants at a Sepulveda apartment house complained to the building’s manager that their swimming pool was turning into a miniature Everglades. The courtyard pool looked and smelled like a bubbling bog of pea soup garnished with a rubber glove, plastic cups and a half-eaten ear of corn.

Parents worried that children would slip into the muck and disappear. They also complained about the stink and clouds of white bugs that hovered over the pool’s surface, only yards from their apartments.

But even after a health inspector spotted the problem during the first county inspection in almost three years, the pool remained untreated for 11 days. The inspector, overwhelmed by a heavy caseload, was delayed that long in writing the report that ultimately forced the landlord to drain the water or risk prosecution.

“We do the best we can, but we just don’t have enough people,” said Richard Kebabjian, chief of the county’s recreational health program, which monitors the pools.

“None of the pools around here are kept up--it’s a chronic problem, and I’m worried about it for the children’s sake,” said Dan Balderrama, principal of Langdon Avenue Elementary School in the same Sepulveda neighborhood.

Kebabjian said the shortage of personnel has forced him to rank the inspectors’ duties, with routine pool inspections at the bottom of the list. The eight pool inspectors are also responsible for monitoring water quality at the county’s beaches.

Complaints, such as those about “dark” pools, get the next-highest priority. Because of the high risk of drownings and disease under such conditions, inspectors try to respond immediately when they learn of dirty pools, Kebabjian said. If inspectors have to close pools--and even cloudy pools are frequently closed for fear they will turn “dark”--guidelines say they should return within 48 hours to see if the problems have been fixed, he said. But, as in the case of the Sepulveda pool, that is not always possible.

“Basically, we just put out fires,” Kebabjian said.

The problem with that approach is that not all contaminants are visible to the human eye, and thus may go undetected.

Second-to-last on the list before routine pool inspections is checking new pools to make sure they conform with state regulations. Developers cannot open their buildings until pool inspectors approve their projects, creating strong pressure on inspectors to visit construction sites before making the rounds of existing pools, he said.

Kebabjian said he has asked the County Department of Health Services to hire at least nine more pool inspectors next year. But that will not be possible without a fee increase to augment the program’s $1.3-million budget. The fee increase would have to be approved by the county Board of Supervisors.

Earlier this year, the supervisors approved increasing the pool inspection fees 6%--from $98 to $104--over objections of health officials, who said more was needed.

In Orange County, the fee went from $29 in 1981 to $136 in 1986 and has risen more gradually since then to $179, said county analyst Betty Watari. The department now has 48 inspectors who are responsible for checking restaurants as well as pools.

Los Angeles landlords say a large fee increase would mean “the county is just sucking more and more blood,” said Dan Faller, president of the Apartment Owners Assn. of Southern California, which represents about 12,000 landlords.

It also costs pool operators in Southern California an average of $90 a month for once-a-week pool service and $145 for twice-a-week service, according to the Service Industry News.