Quote Originally Posted by Daggit
The pool has been abandoned since last August 29th.
What happened on August 29th?

Its rather a mess. I can see just far enough into the water to verify that there are tadpoles living in there, and there also must be leaves, debris, mud, and who knows what else. The pool is approximately 32 x 15 and has a deep end for the diving board, so I estimate the capacity at 22k gallons. It is equipped with a Tagelus sand filter supplied by a 1/2hp Triton pump, and a gas-fired heater (in New Orleans?).

I am the kind of person who likes to have a plan, which is why I am starting this so far in advance. I'd like to get the pool cleaned up fairly promptly if only to eliminate the odor, but I also have some constraints.

1. I don't see draining and re-filling as an option. The water table here is quite high, and I don't know what hydrostatic relief is available.
Is this a gunite or vinyl pool?

2. I will have only part-time generator power, at least for awhile. The house took 24" of water and the local utility (and good sense) dictates major work before permenant power can be restored. I don't know how quickly temporary construction power can be obtained.
The more you can filter, the better. You probably need 8-12 hours of pump time under normal conditions for that pool; you'll need to exceed that in this scenario.

So far, from my reading, I think that the plan is to have Grainger deliver a pallet of bleach, a new pump motor (it was underwater for a couple of weeks) and several hundred pounds of borax. I guess my biggest concerns are the need to break up the mass of algae so the chlorine can get at it effectively and how to vacuum out, or otherwise remove, debris that the pump/filter can't.
The bleach and pump motor are a good idea. Borax is used to raise the pH so unless you know that your pH is incredibly low, that much borax might be overkill.

I have seen a couple of sites (such as Steve Litts') about this kind of thing, but I would ask this group: Thoughts on cleaning up a swamp?
Dag,
Welcome to the forum. I'm a SE Louisiana resident too and there are a few others here too.

Your proactive approach is commendable and will certainly pay dividends.

I'd manually remove all of the junk in the pool that you possibly can with a leaf rake/hand skimmer. That will probably take many iterations as you'll be working blind.

You'll need to get your chlorine up to shock level (I'd shoot for 15-20 ppm since you almost certainly don't have any CYA in the pool) as soon as you can and bring the pH into the 7.2 to 7.8 range. It will take a bunch of chlorine to keep it at that level. The more often you can test and return the chlorine to that level the faster this will go; 3 times per day is probably the minimum that will get you good results. I wouldn't worry about any of the other chemistry numbers until you get the water cleared up.

Run the filter pump as much as you can. You'll probably have to backwash the filter quite often.

Keep manually removing everything you can throughout the process.

You'll almost certainly have significant staining that you may only be able to deal with by draining, but I think you can deal with that if/when you have to.

Good luck.

Kurt