TUESDAY MORNING UPDATE: FFS. I’ve summarised the latest stir the pool in a follow-up for Chemistry World here.
SUNDAY MORNING UPDATE: Apparently, they’ve drained the pool and are now admitting, finally, that it’s algae, like I said from day 1! Blaming hydrogen peroxide levels “neutralising” the chlorine and allowing algae to grow.
UPDATE to the update: Apparently, the pool smells of farts now, so sulfur compounds, most likely hydrogen sulfide, a product of rotting bio…so once again a hint of it having been an algal problem all along…like I said from the start…
The waters are still murky as are the explanations. I stand by my initial diagnosis that it was algae all along despite all the obfuscating claims for chemical levels, alkalinity, inks and the like. An interesting comment on my recent Chemistry World news story about the pool had this to say:
An overshock of copper sulfate (as algacide) may have been done. With high level of “chlorine” (as oxidizing agent) also done. The chlorine oxidized the copper and formed the greenish colour. The cloudiness could be formed because of algae after oxidizing and also phosphate (which is formed in open pools) can make water cloudy.”
It’s almost as if anything seems a plausible explanation now. Yes, they may have done chemical stuff to the pool, but I am convinced they spotted an algal bloom start and were trying to avert a complete aquatic infection with that stuff. they knew from the start. The team hasn’t officially mentioned using copper sulfate though…if they had used it at the start and that was why it first turned green and cloudy they would’ve known. They could have released that as the explanation rather than stringing the world along that they didn’t know and claiming it was safe even when they supposedly didn’t know. This reinforces my trivial conspiracy theory that they’ve known all along (that it was algae) but they didn’t want to fess up and were opting for chemical being not as bad as biological, which makes a change!
Either way, that diver’s hair is definitely green and not light blue, no matter what he says…