Pond Boss Forums INTRO Questions & Observations emergency

guys have an emergency. built a new swimming pool 40 yards uphill from my catfish pond. pool cracked and they are draining tommorrow morning. water will run into pond. pool of course has cholorine in it. Pond holds 5,400,000 gal of water (1 1/2 acre, average 14 feet deep) pool holds 20,000. since pond holds 200 times more water, will the cholrine from the pool kill catfish in my pond? please hurry and thank you very very much.

Darrell Stringer

Darrell, is there any way you can route this water thru your lawn, or maybe a few bales of hay before it reaches you pond?. I am not qualified to give an opinion, but that never stopped me before - I think you will be ok. Hopefully, some of the experts will check in.

Rats, not enough time. If you had more time, you could dump enough chemicals into the pool to nutralize the chlorine before pumping it out.

I don't have a good answer for you. My WAG is that 1:200 won't do a durn thing, but the pool water won't be evenly distributed around in the pond.

I'm with Scot. You may not have that much of a problem especially as it contacts organic matter with that large of a pond. Chlorine breaks down fast. Sunlight and aeration will speed up it's break down.

That much chlorine should not hurt anything. Like you and Scott said 200 to 1 is a lot of dilution. Further as the chlorine is exposed to air on its way down to the pond it should be ale to escape into the atmosphere. Even if you were at 3 PPM in your pool, when diluted, your catfish should not care or notice. So in short, the math says I would not be worried.

Remember, there is some chlorine in your pond all the time if there is any salt in your pond, and there is salt in your pond.

Agree with the guys above but if you are still worried most place that deal with ornamental ponds have chemicals you can put in to remove chlorine.

Late to the party here.

I also do not think you will have any serious long term problems, unless the pool water is somehow concentrated for an extended period of time. Chlorine gasses out pretty easily. I use to use chlorinated water all the time. The easiest method back then was to fill up a 55 gallon barrel, drop in an air stone and let it run all night. It usually only took a few hours tho. Biggest drawback to that is the residual chlorine buildup in the barrel after repeated procedures. PITA to scrub out!

A pound or so of Sodium Ascorbate (vitamin C) would have neutralized the chlorine in the pool, and being PH neutral would not have any shock value on your fish. Plus it is safe, not like the other chemicals.

I am in the same boat again with chlorinated water, and plan to use this product: Sodium Ascorbate

I'll at least give it a try.

I also have a couple Aquafine UV units, so I'll also give that a try with the small one. The residual chlorine buildup from past experiences is putting a few question marks in my head tho. Scrubbing things is not very high on my list of pleasurable activities

Hope everything turns out OK for you. I would prepare for a few disappointments tho.

There's chloride in the pond at all times. I'd be very surprised if there were any chlorine gas.

Chlorine is in solution -via- the pool water.

It will eventually gas out, except for residuals.

Chloride is a salt, and I doubt a pond could manufacture chlorine on it's own. It's a pretty complex process. And also doubt the Mayans created a calendar that lined all the planets up with perfect ingredients and implicit process control to put chlorine in your pond

Sure am glad that no one was able to crack the nut on, shall we say, destabilizing Chlorine!

Maybe they did, and it is all secret

Hook up a trolling moter in Place and let run to mix the water. add An ice eater and let it run. anything to help mix.

FYI:

Here are example chlorine levels and what they can do to pond fish:

.006 mg/L will kill fish fry in about two days.
.003 mg/L will kill insect larvae, such as dragonflies.
.002 mg/L will fatally damage the sensitive skin on tadpoles, frogs, salamanders and other amphibians.
.01 mg/L is the maximum level that experts say adult fish can tolerate.
.25 mg/L is the level at which only the hardiest koi or other pond fish can survive.
.37 mg/L is the level at which all pond fish will die.

Accordingly; Assuming pond water volume is 5.4 million liquid gallons.
5.4 gallons of chlorine would be = to 1 mg/l, or 1 ppm.
Rounding off, 2 gallons of chlorine would be = to .37 mg/l
Rounding off again, 4.15 liquid ounces would be = to .006 mg/l

Consequently, If your 20,000 gallon pool was at 3 ppm (same as mg/l), this would put the chlorine level in your 5.4 million gallon pond at 0.011 ppm.

I would expect a few issues, but hopefully nothing that will be long term.

Kinda like playing Russian roulette tho!

JKB, great stuff! Where did you get your data (so I can save the link). I agree with your math, nicely done. I was unaware that so little chlorine could do that much damage.

The other think I was thinking about was the fact that there will be a lot of losses during the run down slope. As the water fans out, the surface area will be expanded and the interactions with plants, soils, and air should cause a lot of the chlorine to leave the solution.

Clearly you have thought about this more than the rest, so I will be interested in how much of the chlorine you think will be lost as the water runs downhill to his pond.

Darrell did you know how much chlorine was in your pool before it got pumped? The math would be interesting.

I agree with others in that the chlorine will largely be reacted with before it enters the pond, and if it does, the rest will go very quickly (minutes) as it reacts with whatever it can in the pond. Chlorine is highly reactive, so unless the water is already clean and sterilized as in a normal pool, it does not last long at all. Similarly you could toss something in the pool to neutralize it first, just not sure what. A bag or two of peat moss, some organic fertilizer... anything organic will use it up quickly.

It is crazy IMHO that we swim in and drink chlorine in pools. It cannot be good for us. I swam in my neighbors pool last year, and they must of screwed up the dosage and made it far too high. It fried my nose and eyes, and I wound up smelling phantom smoke for about 2 months until my nose healed.

I got the blue text from another pond magazine web site They deal with other types of ponds tho.

I would bet that a chunk of the chlorine was eliminated on it's path to the pond. That would depend on width of the path and flow rate. I would also guess that a fair amount made it to the pond, and was concentrated a bit. No way to really tell as the only other number we have with a unit is 40 yards. It don't gas off as quick as some people think.

I was just curious to see what the potential in this scenario could be.

Chlorine is a nasty little monster. One thing we will never know, is what other nasty little monsters were spawned by this event, while the chlorine was "hooking up"???

Chlorine isn't a great mutagen, just an oxidizing agent, so there shouldn't be any genotoxicity to your fish.

I was not implicating that the little monster would create a DNA altering event. Just that it reacts with other elements and compounds to create new ones. Maybe just got transformed to something else, that we won't know about.

Once created, never destroyed, just transformed!

I would just buy more catfish and take the chance as opposed to buying anything else....