water park

water park Tuesday's incident that sent 11 people to two area hospitals for excessive chlorine inhalation at Mt. Olympus Water and Theme Park could have been avoided, Lake Delton police say. A maintenance employee with 23 years of experience at the park told police he had been working on a filter/pool pump before a larger than normal quantity of sulfuric acid and chlorine was released in the Poseidon's Rage outdoor wave pool. Lake Delton police and Dells-Delton EMS were called to the water park at 6:49 p.m. Tuesday for a report of three people having problems breathing.

Eventually, eight people were taken to St. Clare Hospital in Baraboo and three were transported to Reedsburg Area Medical Center. The employee told police he has never had an incident like this and felt "terrible" for what happened, a police report states. Owner Nick Laskaris called police after speaking with the maintenance worker. Laskaris said he and his employee believed the cause to be a mechanical failure. In a telephone interview Wednesday, Laskaris said this is the first time something like this has ever happened at the park. "We have a great safety record," he said. "This was a fluke. It's unexplainable." But the police report tells a different story. Laskaris told the responding officer that a wire was not connected, and if it would've been connected it would've shut off the chemical pumps to the other pool/filter pumps.


Police called the employee and asked him to explain what happened. The employee said there is a control system that turns off the chemical pumps when the pool/filter pumps are turned off or not running. The control system for this particular pump was not working because a wire had become dislodged. The employee told the officer he always manually turns off the chemical pumps whenever he turns off any of the pool/pump filters, but in this incident, he did not manually turn off the chemical pumps. As a result, the chemical pumps remained operational even though they were supplying a pump that was turned off, causing the buildup and subsequent release of chlorine and sulfuric acid into the wave pool

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