Cleaning Pools After Bushfires

In this episode of Talking Pools, Lee and Shane discuss the impact of bushfires in Australia and New Zealand, particularly focusing on how these fires affect swimming pools and the necessary cleanup strategies. They share personal experiences and insights on effective pool maintenance post-fire, the importance of community preparedness, and resources available for fire safety. The conversation emphasizes the need for proactive measures to protect homes and pools during fire seasons.


Takeaways

The holiday season brings excitement, especially for families with children.
Bushfires are a significant concern in both Australia and New Zealand.
Static water supplies in pools can be crucial for firefighting efforts.
Effective cleanup of pools post-bushfire can be achieved without draining them.
Using robotic pool cleaners and alum sulfate can aid in pool cleaning after fires.
Community preparedness is essential for fire safety and response.
Local councils may have different regulations regarding wastewater disposal after fires.
Firefighting pumps can be a valuable investment for pool owners in fire-prone areas.
Creating cheat sheets for pool cleaning can help streamline the process for customers.
Engaging with local fire services can enhance community safety and preparedness.

Sound bites

"It's getting those swimming pools ready!"
"It's devastating for what it is."
"Stay safe, most of all."


Chapters

00:00 Introduction and Holiday Cheer
02:52 Current Fire Situations in Australia and New Zealand
09:51 Impact of Bushfires on Pools and Cleanup Strategies
16:10 Effective Pool Cleaning Techniques Post-Fire
27:35 Community Preparedness and Resources for Fire Safety

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Chapters

• 17:47 [Ad] Roof Top Innovations the leading Roofing Company in Waco, Tomball surrounding areas
• 18:33 (Cont.) Cleaning Pools After Bushfires

Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00)
Good afternoon, good evening, good morning, good whatever time of the day it is that you are listening to us. Welcome to Mondays Down Under on the Talking Pools podcast. I'm Lee and I am on the East Coast of Australia. And joining me today, of course, is my good buddy Shane from Auckland, New Zealand. How are you Shane?

Speaker 2 (00:21)
I am fantastically thank you for asking. How you doing?

Speaker 1 (00:26)
Pretty good, pretty good. We're both in black today.

Speaker 2 (00:30)
Oh yeah, we have a bunch of a few now.

Speaker 1 (00:32)
No, it might be good for today's topic though. But no, the sun is shining, it is actually starting to feel a lot more like summer at the moment, so that is a good thing. And we're recording this on the 8th of December, but it will be broadcast on the 15th because it's a week from today. So that only means 10 sleeps till Santa comes.

It's getting close. Are those swimming pools ready,

Speaker 2 (01:00)
The poos are ready, I don't know about my shopping list. That's a whole other story.

Speaker 1 (01:04)
Most importantly though, have you taken Dakota and Hugo to visit Santa?

Speaker 2 (01:09)
We did actually, yeah, yep. My mother-in-law went back two days ago, back home. So we all went to, a week before she left, we all went to Santa's Grotto. It was funny because you could choose to see Santa or the Grinch. And the kind of year that we've had with the children this year before, I think we'll probably need to see the Grinch.

We went inside the room and did their shit themselves. Get out of here! Grinch just sat there like, what, what, what's going on? With an onion in his hand. So, yeah, they all ran away and then I had to have a photo taken sat on his lap. And that was my Christmas photo. Then we got to see Santa after.

Speaker 1 (01:37)
me out.

Tom greaches me.

Speaker 2 (01:56)
Yeah, well they said you've got to take a photo, you've got to have a photo taken. yeah, was an interesting evening.

Speaker 1 (02:07)
Grinch has got really popular at Christmas. It's crazy. And there are some really good Grinch characters out there. The ones that take it on wholeheartedly just, yeah, really make me chuckle. So it is great. So I love Christmas, especially with little ones. It's an exciting time of the year. So I'm a little bit jealous of you, Shane.

Speaker 2 (02:09)
Yeah.

Yeah, well you do have a grandson though, so you can spoil him this year.

Speaker 1 (02:34)
Yes, yeah, but he's a little bit too little yet for to understand sound. He likes the lights on the tree and so that is good.

Speaker 2 (02:45)
and he's gonna love those cardboard boxes. I can guarantee that.

Speaker 1 (02:49)
And we've got many years to look ahead for all those funds and festivities. So that's good. But today's topic, we decided that given the local situations at the moment, we've got fires here in Australia, we've got fires in New Zealand, we should tackle the subject of pools and fires.

So how's the situation in New Zealand at the moment Shane?

Speaker 2 (07:41)
this is something I only actually heard about this morning. but there has been, yeah, fires down in the Tongariro National Park, up to an hour ago, it was 320 hectares, which are burnt, which equates to Lee's got the, acre.

Speaker 1 (08:02)
That's all right. many many hectares was it?

Speaker 2 (08:01)
she lost it.

It's

790 acres at the moment. So yeah, it's still blazing. It's uncontained. And after reading about it, which I didn't realize this is one fire, which is after another one, which started a month ago, which was up to a thousand hectares, which is

It's huge for New Zealand and it's devastating for what it is. mean, I don't know if there's too many swimming pools in that area. It's a national park, but whoever lives on the outskirts, you know, it could potentially be prone to get some form of fire damage, if not from the fire itself or from the smoke. So it isn't something that I've ever tackled.

myself dealing with a cleanup of a pool that has been surrounded by a bushfire or forest fire. So I thought it'd be a good topic for today. A good topic as it can be for today. And if there is people out there that are listening and they are about to tackle any of these pools, clean up any of these pools.

I know you've experienced this in the past Lee, seems Australia does get hit quite hard with bushfires and forest fires over there. Yeah, absolutely. It's good to have a chat about it today.

Speaker 1 (09:29)
Yeah.

Well, we're experiencing our own fires on the, well, they call it the Central Coast, New South Wales, but just north of Sydney, actually. So only an hour or 80 kilometres north of Sydney, there have been a number of homes lost.

And actually, unfortunately, one firefighter has actually passed away, which is absolutely tragic. But quite a heavy populated area. Like I say, it's really, they consider it the northern, northern suburbs of Sydney almost, just, just north of Sydney. So it's, there's 16 homes lost and they're at 129 hectares. So not quite.

as large as your fire over there, Shane, 318 acres, I think it is. There's 80 blazes still burning. So it is something that we're dealing with. Fortunately for us, it's not down here at the moment. So I'll keep my fingers and toes crossed on that one. But yeah, years ago, we did experience quite devastating bushfires. were

basically in the center of Armageddon. And so all around us was burning. So while the pools we were dealing with, or actually I shouldn't say, they weren't impacted, we did deal with some pools on the outer areas of our service area that were heavily impacted, houses destroyed, pools left behind, or equipment destroyed.

And we did have to go through the rectification work or the restoration work with those. We were dealt with every pool, and I mean every pool in our area full of heavy ash. And it was something that we had to deal with the cleanup of. And we actually did manage to do it in a lot of cases without draining the pools. Obviously for those pools that were in

The direct line of fire, they're a different kettle of fish. They really did take more work because they were much more heavily impacted, had debris and all sorts of things through them. But the ones even in the areas where they weren't in the direct line of fire, they were heavily impacted with ash, our own pool included. So yeah, we found some ways around it and my favourite friends were

robotic pool cleaner and clarifying products like alum sulfate tablets and coagulants like clarifiers. So they worked very well. Didn't have to flock a lot of pools. It was only the really heavily impacted pools that we actually had to deal with. So, prior to that, we'd also had fires here.

was the year before actually funnily enough. So 2019 was actually the year we had the big fire and that was where a lot of New South Wales burnt and that's a substantial area of burning. But it even went across the border well heavily into Victoria as well.

But the year before 2018, we actually had a fire just north of here at Tarthra. And Tarthra is one of those beautiful little sleepy seaside towns. Right on the beach, it was March. So not a heavy time of the year for tourists, but still a very popular time of the year. The weather here is gorgeous at that time of the year. And there was, it's a population of

1600. So that goes to show you how small the township was or is. But in that township, there were a hundred, over a hundred homes that were affected by fire. 65 of them were actually destroyed. 39 were heavily affected by fire. And when you think about it, a township of only a hundred, sorry, 1600.

people. That is a lot of homes affected. I think it actually, I did read somewhere that it was 10 % of the homes were actually destroyed in the the Tarthra township. There was also holiday cabins and caravans that were destroyed as well. There was about another 70 of those. So while they're not permanent homes, they are still

residences of forms or in this case, probably a business, a caravan park. So, and obviously a lot of people displaced a lot of chaos raining at that time, but it actually raised something that was really became really important to us as a business. And so I would actually implore other service businesses and pool shops to jump on board with this. that is in Australia and I

think you have them in New Zealand, but I don't know whether it's as prominent as it is here. And I'm not sure about the US, so maybe somebody, one of our counterpart other podcast show hosts can educate me on this. But we have static water supply placards that we can put at the front of our property when we have a pool in our backyard. So SWS on the placard.

pop it out on your front letterbox or on your something prominent at the front of your property. And it alerts the fire brigade to know that you have a static water supply that's in your backyard that they can use for emergency situations. Because what happened in Tathra was it's got a very limited water supply. It's a small town. And of course, everybody had their hoses out trying to water down

their houses, their gardens, fill up their gutters and their downpipes for fire prevention. Or they were trying to fight a fire and even the fire brigade was having trouble getting access to water. So it was something that was a huge concern.

It was something that raised a big concern because the fire brigade said, we didn't know where in the pools were because my first question when we got back after the couple of days of closure that we had, because it actually happened over the weekend, was how many empty pools are we dealing with? And the answer was none, because none of them had been drained to fight the fires. And yet that was my natural reaction was

wouldn't you use the water that's in the pool in the backyard to fight the fire? But it was an interesting fact because then what also happened was a lot of pool owners got wise to that and then started buying specialized firefighting pumps that would then run off diesel generator sort of situation. I don't know the technical name for them, but they're a firefighting pump that doesn't rely on electricity.

and they could set them up to use them next to their pool in case of that situation arising. So when the following year we had the Armageddon's of fires, a lot of people were actually prepared. They had their static water supply signs out the front and they also had their firefighting pumps set up by the pool. So they had learnt by the previous season, which was good.

Speaker 2 (16:54)
I guess it makes it quite difficult in such a large country like Australia where there are a lot of rural towns and there isn't as much main supply of water. Yeah, I know this year Davy Water Products are a big supplier over here which is merged with Waterco. This year I've been receiving quite a lot of emails from them like marketing.

And they've been advertising a lot of their fire pumps as well. So I can imagine there'll be a big product in Australia. And if any of the listeners are looking out to buy one, by all means reach out to Davey if they are in your area. They do sound like a very good product. I can imagine it would just be like a sub-pumpley. I guess you would attach a hose to the end of it.

Speaker 1 (17:41)
Yeah, they sort of have their own built-in generator because they're often in like a pull cord, almost like a, I liken it to like a motor mower where you pull the cord and off the engine goes and it allows the water to be sucked up and delivered. And yeah, you just can set up a firefighting hose with it. And also

even your pool hose to draw it from the pool. So there's ways and means and you've got this big vessel of water in your backyard. It could make the huge difference in saving your home. And I think that even came to light in the US fires in California where the pools were being used by private firefighters to actually douse down homes and help save them.

And yeah, we, unfortunately, it seems to be an environmental issue at the moment. Every country seems to deal with it during their summer season, obviously more so than any other time when it's dry and it's hot and we get those bushfires come through. And then of course, add to that the winds and that can just make the situation quite horrific. I do know on the central coast, the one that's just north of Sydney,

It was in very steep terrain, very tree heavy terrain. A lot of residents is there and I'm looking at the pictures online and there's lots of swimming pools there that are still full of water.

Speaker 2 (19:09)
Was this the one in 2019? Yeah, the most recent one. Right, OK.

Speaker 1 (19:12)
That's the one that's

running now. Yeah, there's, I was just looking online and there's a aerial photo and I can see three swimming pools in there and they're all full of water. So they have obviously firefighting pumps or, and actually I even down our way during the 2019 fires, one of our clients actually came in to get his pool balanced and after the fires.

And he said his pool was empty. He had used it to fight, only save his own home, but he saved his two neighbors homes with that swimming pool as well. So well worth the investment of the firefighting pump. I think he even had, he had a sprinkler system set up on his roof that he was able to connect to the water source of the pool as well.

Speaker 2 (20:05)
Wow.

Speaker 1 (20:06)
And he could walk away and leave it and it would continue to run. yeah, amazing what you can set up these days.

Speaker 2 (20:17)
Yeah, so did you selfly. When you've come to a pool after a forest fire and it's depending on what the condition is, you know, what would be your standard procedure in order to start cleaning the pool up and making sure the area is safe to working?

Speaker 1 (20:35)
Well the thing with ash is it's quite dense, so it tends to sit on the bottom of the pool. So we found with the pools that we were dealing with that weren't in the line of fire, so the likes of our pool and the pools in our immediate local area, the water was actually quite clear, but you could see the ash on the bottom. So that gave us a great opportunity to be able to vac to waste without actually even having to flock the pools.

So we could vac to waste. We could also put robotic pool cleaners in. What they didn't pick up, they stirred up. And then we would put in alum sulfate tablets and a liquid clarifier into the water. This is obviously in a media filter situation. The alum sulfate would make the filtered media a better catch up, make it filter finer and

the clarifier in the water would actually, those particles would be attracted to each other, become denser and then easier to catch. So the combination of those things, so making the particles in the water easier to catch, making your filter a better catcher and also getting the robotic pool cleaners in there and stirring up the water. What they weren't picking up, they were stirring up and then what they were stirring up was getting caught in the filter.

And the combination of those actually made the cleanup quite easy. did take a couple of days, but very, very cost effective for the owners. Very effective to the point where we sold a lot of dolphin pool cleaners over that period. And I think we spoke about this on a previous podcast, but I actually did do a marketing campaign at that time and put out there that

anybody who we put a video to show how effective it was at actually cleaning up what it was actually able to catch up or catch in the filters. And we actually said anybody who purchases a cleaner during this week or the two weeks I think was that we would donate $150 per cleaner to the local RFS. So the local firefighting, rural firefighting service.

and which are a complete voluntary group. And we wanted to help them out for giving so much of their own time because they're not paid. They're completely volunteers and they go out there and risk life and limb. And they do so sometimes with very old equipment. So we thought this was a way of us giving back.

We fortunately, I think we wrote a check for about $1,800. So we did sell quite a few robotic pool cleaners, which was really good. And I even had another pool shop that was further up the coast, saw my advert and rang me and said, do you mind if we jump on the same bandwagon? I said, go for it. The more money we can donate to the RFS, the better. And so they jumped in and did the same thing, which was really good. Now.

Other than that, yes, you do need to go through the flocking and the backing to waste situation if the water is really dense. And we did have that where we had pools that where the home was destroyed, equipment destroyed, that sort of thing. We had to leave those pools, unfortunately, because no power, no electricity, nobody living there.

We even had a couple of pools that were actually boarded over, so they just left them as they were and put heavy boards over the pool so that nothing could get in there. They laid dormant while they were rebuilding the house. We had to replace equipment and that. And when we did that, then we did drain the pool of that water and it cleaned it up, refilled it.

But obviously you want to be very cautious about that. You don't want the pools to pop out of the ground. So you need to make sure that no recent rainfall, no heavy waterlogged soil around the pool, no water table nearby, that sort of thing. You want to make sure that that pool's not going to pop out of the ground. Heaven forbid those people have been through enough without the pool popping out of the ground as well.

So yeah, but flocking and vacing to waste, the good old fashioned clean up a black pool job. But of course, there's a lot of, could be a lot of crap at the bottom of that pool that we couldn't see. Branches, debris, and so making sure that in the case where we were doing a flock and a vac to waste, that we were.

blind raking that pool to remove as much as that debris and leaf litter and branches and heaven knows what else was in there out of that pool before we actually flocked it and vac'd it to waste because we all know we don't want to contend with having to unblock the vac head every two minutes or five minutes and empty the skimmer basket constantly. The more we can minimize that when you're vacing to waste, the better.

Speaker 2 (25:37)
Did the local council or the water board in those areas, did they warn people not to put too much down the waste line, know, if they are back into waste? Or did that not seem to be an issue? I remember on Stephen Wayne's show when he was talking about the

fires in California and he mentioned that some of the people were just back in out to waste on the road.

Speaker 1 (26:10)
Yep. Yeah. So with our local councils, so different local councils do handle wastewater differently. So this will vary area to area, state to state. So with our local council, it is a requirement that all wastewater go into the sewer system. And if you're on acres, then really you can

do what you like because you've got a huge parcel of land and you can pass that water over onto your property wherever you want to put it. we did that with the predominantly the ones that were heavily affected were right in the line of fire. They were on acres. They were on substantial parcels of land.

So we didn't have to worry too much about that. We did actually have to worry about the quality of the water coming out of the taps, particularly in those areas because the infrastructure had been compromised. So the quality of water that was coming out of the taps wasn't great and water had to be shipped in. of course then water was a scarcity at that time. So there was different.

issues that we had to contend with there. But in our local suburb, no, backing to waste was just go straight into the sewer. Having said that, I do know that some councils in particular areas around Australia actually don't have the wastewater going into the sewer because they don't want the salty water to go into the sewer because apparently it

can play havoc with the or the chlorinated water can play havoc with the sewer system into their opinion or that's their opinion or their belief that that is their concern with their infrastructure, but not in our area wasn't an issue.

Speaker 2 (28:03)
So would that water be in your, would you vacuum that water to curbside, like stormwater?

Speaker 1 (28:13)
No, well in some councils that's where it goes, goes to storm water. But in our council it's actually illegal to put it into the storm water because probably because we're a coastal town and so our storm water actually goes out to the ocean so therefore they don't want any contaminants to go into the storm.

Speaker 2 (28:33)
It's interesting to some areas around in Auckland where the stormwater and the septic lines are joined together. It's not something I've ever heard before, but they were saying that these particular pockets, built up areas were built maybe about 70 or 80 years ago. And that's just the way it was designed back then. And I think it's just going to cost too much for them to actually redo the whole areas.

Speaker 1 (28:57)
I have heard of local councils actually doing what they call smoke tests where when you're not supposed to be connected to stormwater that they actually feed smoke up the stormwater line and see where it comes out at the property. Yeah and so that can show itself if somebody has a waste line that is connected to the stormwater.

Speaker 2 (29:13)
Ready? ⁓

Speaker 1 (29:23)
instead of to the sewer. Haven't actually seen it happen in my local area but I have heard stories.

Speaker 2 (29:29)
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (29:29)
So I suppose for our listeners out there, there might be some tips and tricks in that bit of information that might help you tackle some ash-ridden pools. Hopefully, I pray for all of you that you're not dealing with them. I hope we don't have a bad season this year. Yeah, better not to have bushfires and not have to.

nut pulls. But if you do the first thing you should do is check your stocks. Do you have flocculating products? Do you have alum sulfate tablets? Do you have liquid clarifier? Do you have filter cleaner and degreaser? Things like that because you will need to to clean that out of your your filter as well. And yeah

Speaker 2 (30:14)
can imagine a lot of phosphate treatment as well, as there'd be a lot of phosphorous being put into the pools.

Speaker 1 (30:22)
Phosphate treatment, algae treatment, super chlorination. We sort of did all of those after we did the cleanup just as a preventative as well. So just to be doubly sure. But the pools generally in our immediate area weren't too much trouble. And we actually made some cheat sheets. So if anybody wants them, they're welcome to reach out.

to me and I'm happy to share them, but we had some cheat sheets for cleanups of in this situation just to simplify it for our customers. Cause as you can imagine, we were being inundated in the shop with people coming in and asking the same question over and over again, and or us giving the same instructions over and over again. So to simplify it for the team, we just created a cheat sheet, one for cartridge filters, one for sand or media filters.

one for if they have a robotic pool cleaner and one for if they didn't. So we had a few different options depending on how they were going to tackle it. And then that way they could take home their handy dandy little sheet of information that could help them through the process. So it's all about being proactive instead of reactive or actually in this case it probably was reactive because we weren't expecting the fires but

We're being proactive about what we knew was going to come in through the door and how could we best tackle that? How could we best assist our customers? And then also with the static water supply, what could we do for our community to help improve the situation should it occur again? And we saw that as our little bit of giving back for the community because I don't know whether I mentioned, but with the static water supply posters, we put

out there through our network that static water supply placards were actually available in our shop. We were very fortunate to have a member of our team was actually a member of the rural fire service. So one of the volunteers and she was able to coordinate for us to get some placards that we could have in the shop. And we let all our customers know and they could come in and fill out, just put their name down on the register with their address.

and they sign it and then they took their placard home and could put that up in front of their properties. So if you don't have access to that, maybe you could talk to your local Rural Fire Service and see if you can help facilitate that through your business or even how your customers can contact the Rural Fire Service. You could even be really proactive in your business and actually set up an afternoon of information and invite

the RFS to actually have a table at your shopfront and be able to sign people up there. Maybe put a little barbecue on for the local community at the same time too and do your bit for the local RFS. So being proactive and doing your community civic duty.

Speaker 2 (33:18)
That's a very good idea Lee and yeah most of all just definitely stay safe. 100 %

Speaker 1 (33:23)
Absolutely.

And like you said, if people are interested in firefighting pumps, then companies like Davey are a great place to start too. yeah, so a few little tips and tricks there that might be able to help people in these situations. So that, like you say, most of all, stay safe.

Speaker 2 (33:46)
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (33:47)
And we hope none of you have to contend with it this season.

Speaker 2 (33:50)
Yeah, fingers crossed.

Speaker 1 (33:53)
Well, I think that draws us to the end of today's session. So thank you, Shane, for joining me. Thank you listeners for listening. We greatly value you following us along through our episodes. I do have a couple of shout outs today. I had a new student this week who listens readily. So hello to you, Chris.

Hello to one of my colleagues in Perth. And hello, Sam. I know you listen because you showed me your Spotify list and he is in top 3%. I think he was was either 3 or 6 % of listeners. That's how much he listened. So hello, Sam. So the pressure is on guys. Actually, if you listen to the podcast regularly and you eat

Speaker 2 (34:37)
Thank you.

Speaker 1 (34:44)
our podcast made your Spotify list. We would love you to share it on the Talking Pools page. So keep an eye out for that. Anyway, we hope you have a great week ahead. If you have any questions, please drop us a line at talkingpools at gmail.com. We love to hear from you. We love to get your feedback. We love to get your questions and your topic suggestions because we want to make this podcast as helpful or as interesting to you as it can possibly be.

So don't hesitate to drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. But until then, have a great week and we will see you next Monday. Thanks guys.

Speaker 2 (35:26)
Amen.