First a little background: For the last two summers I've been a health inspector for Philadelphia. Most of my time was spent inspecting (read: shutting down) swimming pools. Yes I am the big (5'7") bad asshole health inspector who tells you that everything is dirty and that a bunch of your shit is broken. I do my job thoroughly and without remorse. I've been to 97 aquatic facilities, of which 46 had one or more of their pools closed. The length of closure ran from an hour to the rest of the summer depending on how special the circumstances were. Most of the time, the apathetic lifeguards just forget to add chlorine and I close 'em for that. Other times they operator will have a chlorine fetish and will load so much chlorine in the water that air coming off the water will bleach my hair. Most people are resigned to their fate and don't argue too much about the impending closure. The SOB's know they're wrong and bite the bullet. But every so often some douche bag will fight it. It is here that my story begins:
Today I visited the worst pool ever. On the outside it looked great. The chairs were in order, the bottom was vacuumed, and the trash was emptied. But internally it was horrific. In the pump room alone I found 3 obvious lethal conditions. I give you a quick run down of my report:
*The toilet waste line leaked into the pool.
*Another leaking pipe from the pool, was dripping onto a live electrical wire. (220 V line)
*The water heater was missing a grill, so the flames shot out the bottom 2" from the tank, singeing everything nearby.
*Objects nearby included Hydrochloric acid (second strongest acid, period) stored in plastic containers. HCL when heated breaks down to chlorine gas. As the gas heats up it will expand and explode form the container. The tear in the container would allow the liquid acid to escape. There was 8 gallons of this stuff waiting to explode! The site operator tells me that those bottles are designed to melt before the contents would explode. So instead there might have been a chlorine (death) cloud ready to overtake the zip code!
*To top it all off, they had no chlorine in the water.
Can you guess how long they were closed? Three mother fucking hours! The site bitched so much, my supervisor was forced to reopen them. Why? The blowhard found a tiny loophole. (He had no proof of my zero chlorine reading.) He claimed I faked it. Never mind the other ridiculous violations, they reopened a few hours later despite only fixing the toilet and moving the HCl further from the heater.
"Flamehart the Heater" still breathes fire on the rest of the pump room. There is still a steady drip onto the 240 V electrical wire. And the same assholes are still operating. I'm waiting to hear about them on the news.
They got way with it because they claimed that I didn't follow a certain procedure. A procedure which never existed. (I was supposed to contact the manager before doing the inspection. Not much of a surprise inspection that would have been!)
Other contrivances include:
1) The operator claimed that the pipe was always dripping, including during my previous inspections. He accused me of waiting 3 inspections before I would purposefully close the pool. Let me tell you folks, I don't miss things like that! If there was a leak I would have seen it the first two times. Further more, if I wanted the schmuck's pool closed I would have done it ALL THREE times. My reply to the operator after his claim as follows: "There was no leak before. If there was one, I would have written it down. Two: You are admitting foreknowledge of a deadly condition, and since it still exists, have not corrected it. Therefore you are criminally negligent." He clamped his cucksucking mouth about the leaking pipe onto the wire after that.
2) K'vetch the whiner: He told me and my supervisor that, "It's like you're [me] coming out here just looking for things wrong!"
Well duh! That is what my job description says. However it more correctly says that I am confirming that the pool is being run properly, and looking for unsafe conditions. Not the negative "looking for things wrong".
3) bitch-ass: "I work with L&I all the time, and they have a reputation for being very strict and uneasy to work with, you are much worse then them!"
Thank-you, I appreciate knowing that I do such a thorough job and that I can be compared to full-time staff. Especially those of L&I caliber. But this does beg the question: Is L&I slipping?
So to sum up, I am disgruntled. I've always known that my job is impotent. I've seen operator after operator get away with horrific violations, all because of some bureaucratic bullshit. But never would I have expected such gross negligence from my bosss' on such a text book example of shit-piss poor operating. The whole department is there to protect people from this level of stupidity and/or greed for money. Starting tomorrow, I'm doing the bare minimum to no get in trouble. I'm not sweating a drop for those petty bureaucrat wannabes. Fuck em!