The family of a man who drowned a year ago in the swimming pool at the Quality Inn & Suites Seattle Center has filed a wrongful-death suit against the owners of the hotel, claiming poor maintenance made the water unusually murky and contributed to a botched rescue operation by firefighters.
[…] The hotel operators, Seattle Hospitality Inc., last Friday filed a third-party complaint seeking to draw the city of Seattle into the suit as a second defendant, claiming the Seattle Fire Department failed to conduct an adequate water rescue and didn’t find Deboch in the pool after firefighters were summoned to the hotel.
Except it’s hard to perform an adequate water rescue when the water is so filthy that you can’t see the victim.
[…] Seattle firefighters arrived within 2½ minutes of the call, according to Fire Department records. They searched the pool using a rescue hook and thermal-imaging camera but found no sign of Deboch.
A Fire Department report states that firefighters “believed they were visually able to confirm that no victim was in the pool” and thought they could see the pool’s bottom.
A civilian also got in the pool to search for Deboch, but no firefighters entered the water, according to the report.
I worked three summers as a lifeguard (i.e. pool boy) at swimming pools at four different residential apartment buildings in Philadelphia, and I can tell you that we would’ve been fired had we allowed the water to get anywhere near that sort of condition. We checked chlorine and pH levels throughout the day, and would clear swimmers out of the pool if the chemicals ever got out of whack. Murkiness wasn’t even an option.
“There were more than a dozen people allowed back in the pool to swim,” Micah LeBank, the attorney representing Deboch’s family, said in an interview this week. “The hotel let people get back into that murky water and swim around, unable to see the body.”
That’s disgusting.
When Deboch still wasn’t found, his friends searched the pool again.
Tom Fleming, a 51-year-old off-duty firefighter vacationing at the hotel, joined in the search and cleared the pool of swimmers, according to the Fire Department report.
The Seattle Times reported last year that after about a 10-minute search Fleming felt something in the center of the deep end of the pool. He asked the hotel to turn off the pump and was able to pull up Deboch’s body.
“You could not see him until you got him 18 inches to the surface,” Fleming told The Times last year. “I was fishing around and even though he was at the very bottom, he was not always in the same spot. Finding a victim in a pool in that condition is like trying to find a needle in a haystack.”
Granted, water clarity at indoor pools is more difficult to maintain due to the lack of natural oxidation from sunlight, but that’s no excuse. The hotel was clearly negligent.* And their effort to make taxpayers liable by pulling the fire department into the lawsuit is offensive.
Given the time that had already elapsed, firefighters might have been able to pull the victim from the pool without permanent neurological damage, had they been able to immediately locate the body. But the cloudy water made a timely rescue—about a 10 minute window—all but impossible. From the facts presented in the press, there is no question that improper pool maintenance impeded firefighters’ ability to do their job.
Swimming pools are potential public health hazards, both due to the drowning risk and the spread of disease causing organisms like Cryptosporidium, Giardia, and E. coli. That’s why they’re so heavily regulated. So if a hotel is going to seek a competitive edge by offering guests the amenity of an indoor pool, then the hotel has both a moral and legal obligation to properly secure and maintain it.
The hotel should settle with the victim’s family and leave Seattle taxpayers out of it.
* My former editors at The Stranger never would have allowed me to use such direct language, for fear that the use of such a legalistic term like “negligence” might leave the paper vulnerable to a defamation suit. But my own personal experience as a former pool maintenance professional leaves zero question in my mind that it is negligent to allow guests into water so cloudy that they could swim for three hours without noticing the dead body at the bottom of the pool. And as a blogger, I feel that it would be negligent of me to shy away from bluntly speaking the truth.
Personal injury/damages lawyers are magnetically attracted to the deepest pockets. Potential target lawyer’s know this all too well and are practiced at the dog-whistle: “don’t sue us, sue them! they have the money”. Of course they may end up suing both parties sequentially; that very sad young corpse has dollar signs written all over it.
And the failure of City-owned thermal imaging equipment to detect body heat from the submerged victim is the hotel’s fault…….
How, exactly?
Contributory negligence. There’s liability to go around, and it comes down to percentages. @1 is correct – both potential defendants have money, and plaintiff will eventually go after both of them, if it hasn’t already begun.
Interesting that you mention relative levels of caution regarding your use of terminology, and why that might be. When you reach a point in life at which you have more financial assets subject to attachment should you commit a libelous or slanderous deed, your caution level may increase. Or at least it should.
Washington State Department of Health rules for swimming pool water quality and and enforcement of standards are posted here:
http://apps.leg.wa.gov/WAC/def.....46-262-050
http://apps.leg.wa.gov/WAC/def.....46-262-120
Why didn’t the Seattle-King County Health Department inspect this pool and shut it down for blant violation of water quality standards? Maybe because after years of relentless budget cuts the skeleton crew at the Health Department had to deprioritize this work.
http://seattletimes.com/html/l.....etxml.html
Here’s a grotesque haiku that underscores my point:
Conservatives want
H.D. to be small enough
To drown peeps in pools
Washington State Department of Health rules for swimming pool water quality and and enforcement of standards are posted here:
http://apps.leg.wa.gov/WAC/def.....46-262-050
http://apps.leg.wa.gov/WAC/def.....46-262-120
Why didn’t the Seattle-King County Health Department inspect this pool and shut it down for blant violation of water quality standards? Maybe because after years of relentless budget cuts the skeleton crew at the Health Department had to deprioritize this work.
http://seattletimes.com/html/l.....etxml.html
Here’s a grotesque haiku that underscores my point:
Conservatives want
H.D. to be small enough
To drown peeps in pools
I feel sorry for that guy, but I have a really hard time with a family suing over a drowning that happened when the victim knew he couldn’t swim.
@2 I have never posted anything defamatory in any actionable sense of the word. The risk is almost never in losing a defamation case, it’s in the cost of defending against one. And since I could never prevent a determined party from frivolously suing me, my only choice is to write fearlessly or not all. I choose the former.
As for your theory of defective thermal imaging equipment, well, such equipment does not generally see well through water. They used the tool at their disposal, but it was not up to this task.
Legally the question is, had firefighters gone into the water (and they are not trained to do so) would they have likely found the body in time? Subsequent events (the later 10 minute search) suggest no. The article states that they canceled a call for a dive team 17 minutes after arrival. By then the victim would have certainly been dead.
So no, I don’t think that there is contributory negligence. Given the conditions there was little the firefighters could do in time to save the victim’s life. Had they stripped to their skivvies and dove in untrained, the outcome likely would’ve been the same.
@ 6
The risk is almost never in losing a defamation case, it’s in the cost of defending against one.
You’re preaching to the choir, dude. Google ‘error in radiology’.
While YMMV, I read one article that calculated the cost of practicing defensive medicine at 7% of total health care costs.
@2 Emergency responders have qualified tort immunity, dumbass. Also, negligence claims arise only against those who owe a duty of care. In this case, the hotel had a duty to provide its guests with a safe pool. The city does not have a duty to rescue people who drown in hotel pools.
@6 “So no, I don’t think that there is contributory negligence.”
Technically, this is a cross-claim, not a claim for contribution. In any case, Washington is a comparative negligence state, so contributory negligence does not apply.
Awww! You mean the Stranger boys fucked your fat ass for years but wouldn’t let you speak truth to power? You are so brave!
I don’t know which scares me more, the fact that the hotel was willing to let their pool get this disgusting or that people were still willing to swim in it in this condition. I’m also surprised nobody reported this hotel to the chain’s head office. A dirty pool is the sort of thing that can get a franchisee in a lot of trouble with the chain’s inspectors.
When traveling I’ve stayed in some rather run-down motels before, but I don’t think I’ve seen a pool so dirty you couldn’t easily see the bottom even at the places with vermin in the rooms and dirty sheets.