A swim meet planned for January at the Shawnee Mission Aquatic Center in Lenexa has been canceled due to ongoing air quality concerns that plagued the facility earlier this year.
Organizers say they decided to be cautious and cancel the Brian Howard Memorial Swim Meet while they await the results of an air quality and ventilation study after an August incident in which swimmers became ill.
The meet was expected to draw more than 500 swimmers
Scheduled for Jan. 12-14, the meet was canceled in a joint move by the Shawnee Mission School District, which owns the building, the Johnson County Park and Recreation District, which operates the pool and books non-district events at the venue and the Kansas City Blazers Swim Team, which organizes the annual Brian Howard event named in honor of one of the team’s former swimmers.
During the aquatic center’s last large swim meet, the Central Zones 14 & U Long Course Championships hosted by the KC Blazers in August, swimmers complained of feeling ill, experiencing stinging eyes, runny noses and discomfort in breathing.
That event prompted the SMSD to hire an outside agency to conduct an audit of the center’s air quality and ventilation systems.
Results of that audit are still pending with no set timetable for when it will be completed.
The size of the meet caused concerns
While the aquatic center has hosted smaller meets since the August event without any major incidents, the January competition was expected to bring in about 550 swimmers.
Without the audit complete, both SMSD and JCPRD didn’t feel comfortable moving forward, said Kellen Jenkins, marketing and communications manager for the Johnson County Park and Recreation District.
“We could have made some decisions based off of that [audit] to make sure that we were doing everything we could to keep the athletes that are coming to these meets safe and healthy,” he said. “But because we don’t have that assessment yet from the county or from the school district, we ultimately decided to hold off.”
Pool chemicals are a focus of audit, worries
There’s something about larger meets that may need to be reckoned with in the future, officials say.
Chemicals put in the pool are meant to neutralize hair and body products swimmers might be wearing, like body spray, hair care items or deodorant, said David Smith, SMSD spokesperson.
With meets involving more swimmers comes the problem of larger amounts of those products being used at once, potentially creating air quality problems.
“When you have lots of those things in the pool as competitors, when it’s neutralized, it creates off-gases, which very often kind of hanging around the pool surface,” Smith said. “So that’s the thing, I think that as we understand it, that was causing some reactions among competitors.”
Organizers remain cautious
While the investigation continues into the venue’s air handling and HVAC systems, Smith said they are being selective with the events they book for the foreseeable future.
“The building’s still in use. They’re still swimming. We have league meets and other kinds of things,” he said, “We’ll sort of evaluate each event on its merits, but I do think we want to avoid any huge events that we’re not confident that the the building systems will be able to manage.”
Go deeper: Officials look into air quality issues at Lenexa aquatic center
