Unsafe Drain, HOA neglects it, who can I contact?

[SouthGuard]

Hey everybody, first post here. I'm a Lifeguard in Georgia. The pool I guard at is about 2 miles away from my house, but there is no problem there, it's my own pool that concerns me.

Our pool is pretty small, as the subdivision is only 57 homes and one of the four drain covers is completely unscrewed. The pool utilizes four main drain ports, and while this may divert suction, 1 of the covers is loose, and the covers are not the new round shaped ones to prevent entrapment. I know for a fact that this is illegal, and violates the Virginia Graeme Baker Pool and Spa Safety Act.

This was a problem all last summer. The lifeguard wrote it down every day, and they never fixed it. My question is, who can I contact (authorities, inspectors) to force the HOA to fix this? For this upcoming summer, they cheaped out and decided not even to hire a lifeguard, so now all the kids have to have parents at the pool with them. I'm pursuing this cause for the following two reasons.

1. I believe the safety of the children swimming at our neighborhood pool is at risk. This should be of up most importance to everyone.

2. I want to nail the HOA as hard as I possibly can. They are a bunch of power hungry individuals who haven't achieved true leadership positions in life, so they think they can make up for this personal lack by bossing their neighbors around. Besides the lifeguard decision, a few years back they were giving a guy a tough time about his payments when he was struggling financially. When he got the money together, he dropped it off at the HOA president's house in 80,000 pennies. I went to his house and personally thanked him for this.

So in summary, the drain isn't to code, and who I can contact to make the HOA pay for this as much as humanly possible?

[PoolDoc]

I'm sorry, Jake, but I have zero interest in helping you sock-it-to-the-HOA.

By FAR the largest risk to the kids in your neighborhood, is a risk of drowning, not suction entrapment. The VGB is a perfect example of the sort of monstrous law that's created when a horrible tragedy occurs, and people run around say, "There ought to be a law . . ." Nobody, including the CPSC, has determined how to comply, because the law was all impulse and hardly any engineering.

If you simply wanted to save lives, you could save 10x the lives VGB will save, simply by diverting the money the CPSC alone (and that's a tiny, tiny fraction of the money) spent on VGB so far to neo-natal care funds for low income moms. But, again, it's not about saving the most lives possible, it's about scratching an emotional itch created by a terrible -- but extremely low-risk and improbable -- event.

Given that the risk of drowning is far, far greater than the risk of entrapment, and given that you are so concerned with "the safety of the children swimming at our neighborhood pool", may I suggest that you volunteer to guard the pool for free, on your off days and hours? That would contribute far more to their safety, then this apparently long-standing vendetta you are pursuing against the HOA.

I have no love for HOA's and there are many, many accounts of the petty tyrants these organizations attract. But, if you want to declare war on yours, I suggest an attorney's office is a much better place for such a thing then here.