Piedmont Park pool won’t reopen till Friday morning

The newly renovated Piedmont Park swimming pool closed Thursday afternoon for fecal contamination, park officials said.

Conservancy vice president Monica Thornton said a 5-year-old child with diarrhea produced the fecal matter that closed the new aquatic center around 4:30 p.m. Thursday.

The Piedmont Park Conservancy said the pool will reopen at 11 a.m. Friday.

Normally, the pool would have remained open to the public until 5 p.m., and until 7 p.m. for Aquatic Center members.

“We are very sorry for the inconvenience,” Conservancy spokeswoman Ericka Sims said. “I think people are respecting the fact that we closed the pool for everyone’s safety.”

This is the second time the pool has been closed for fecal contamination since the newly refurbished, facility reopened Memorial Day weekend, Thornton said.

To clean the pool, all the water in the 6,400-square-foot pool must cycle through its filtration devices three times — a process Thornton said could typically take up to 24 hours.

“Because of the size of the [filtration] pump, the pool would actually be swimable in about eight hours,” she said.