The Great Pool Debacle of 2009: Part II -- NEXT DAY UPDATE:

I spent FORTY minutes on the phone today discussing this cursed pool. Apparently the "eccentric" constituents keep calling the county. They have had the police, code enforcement and animal control out to the house. My poor beleaguered public servant partners at the county are totally nonplussed. They want to do the right thing and try to keep the pool for the family that will eventually buy the house, but they don't want to waste taxpayer money on an asset that won't recoup its value and they have to do something to get Connie Constituent to please. stop. calling.

Well, I had the pool drained the next morning, as requested. So now the county would like to maintain the concrete bowl instead of collapsing the walls into the empty hole in case the next owner wants to spend the money to fill the pool back in. Look, the county is coming from a really generous place. They are trying to preserve the joy of a pool for the future family. We've all heard that the road to hell is lined with good intentions. I'm from southern California where just about every backyard has an in-ground pool. This may not be common knowledge outside of pool-centric areas, but the earth exerts a mighty force on the walls of in-ground pools. If you empty a pool and don't fill it back up with water relatively quickly, your pool walls will start to crack and collapse from the pressure of the surrounding earth. Simply filling the concrete bowl with dirt and gravel will not exert the same pressure as water. Any effort to reuse those walls will be futile because the outside pressure will ruin the structural integrity of the walls themselves.

I begged the county officials to release the pool idea and let the earth reclaim it, but they were adamant. I called the GC. He confirmed my supposition about the pressure of surrounding earth collapsing the pool walls in the absence of water. Essentially, here is how he broke it down:

• The county fixes the pool by doing all the work mentioned in this post: $10,000
• The county fills the pool with dirt and a future homeowner decides to later dig out the dirt and rebuild the pool with all of the accouterments that a pool requires: $10,000

Any way you slice it, to maintain that pool, somebody is going to be out $10,000. Either the county is going to have to spend it on the front end to fix and secure the pool and be content not to get it back in the final sale or the family is going to have to spend it to rebuild the pool after they move in.

How did this whole thing end? We are collapsing the concrete sides into the empty hole, filling in the rest with dirt, planting grass seeds and calling it good. I know I initially wanted to keep the pool, but the pool is now just a giant distraction. Kiss the pool good-bye; it'll be gone in a few days.