Swimmers bring legal action against school

Athletes say they were neglected by Athletic Department

By Nathan Hathaway

A legal claim has been filed against Fresno State on behalf of swimmers who complained of health problems from practicing in the university pool last season.

Eighteen members of the 2002 Fresno State swim team filed a claim against the school April 15. The claim says the swimmers suffered injuries “as a result of chemical imbalances in the team pool.”

“ We were dreading [getting in the pool],” freshman swimmer Julie Heaton said. “The pool was like acid. It was like putting salt in a wound.”

The swimmers said they began noticing symptoms in October and complained to the athletic department that something was wrong with the North Gym pool, where they spent an average of 16 hours per week practicing.

Fresno State had the pool tested and offered the swimmers medical care. The athletic department also sent a letter to parents saying there should be no long-term effects.

The claim states the swimmers were suffering from some or all of the following symptoms: hair loss, skin rashes, a tingling tongue, yellow palms, burning eyes and skin, stained teeth, nasal burns, dry skin and lips, heartburn, swelling, lung pain, wheezing, difficulty in breathing, and “many other physical difficulties, including mental stress.” The claim, filed against the state of California but naming Fresno State, also says the swimmers “experienced or reasonably may expect to experience in the future a medical diagnosis of asthma.”

“ The one that probably affected them the most was the fact that it irritated some of them in their respiratory system, especially the girls that were asthmatic,” interim coach Tom Milich said. “And some of them really never recovered from that.”

The swimmers are each seeking more than $10,000 in damages.

“Nobody’s after the money. We don’t even care. Money was never an issue about it. [We’re] kind of making a point that they’ve got to pay better attention to certain things. They can’t just neglect things when it comes to people’s health,” sophomore swimmer Kim Hitch said. “[We want] an apology, or something, just for them to admit they were wrong and that they didn’t handle the situation properly.”

About two days after first noticing the rashes, team members said they told then-assistant coach Frannie DeBord they thought there was a problem with the chlorine in the pool.

“ They were all out on deck in their swimsuits, and they showed me the rashes,” said DeBord, now an assistant at Tulane University in New Orleans. “I went to (assistant athletic directors) Steve (Weakland) and John Kriebs.”

Weakland said that at first the athletic department thought it might have been a detergent or lotion the swimmers were using that was giving them the skin rashes.

“ It didn’t look like it was a chlorine problem. It didn’t look like it was a pool problem,” Weakland said. “The numbers were good. The readings on the pool were good.”

But the swimmers thought it was a problem with the pool.

“ Being a swimmer, you know chlorine levels,” Hitch said. “You know when there’s something the matter. Like you know when the arches in your shoes are bad when you’re a runner, you know when the chemicals are off.”

Problems in the Pool

The facilities management department, which is in charge of maintaining the pool, tests the chemical levels every day. The daily readings were coming back in a slightly elevated, but not dangerous, range—10-12 parts chlorine to every 1 million parts water in the pool. In spite of the normal readings, the athletic department notified the environmental health and safety department, which took a sample of the pool’s water to an off-campus site to be tested. That test also came back at 10 parts per million.

Though both the school and the swimmers said 10 parts per million is only slightly higher than normal, Dennis Jumper, commercial accounts executive for Leslie’s Pool Supply, said even 10 may be too high.

“ If it was above 5, you don’t put people in that body of water,” Jumper said. “If it’s above 5, you’ve got to do something (to neutralize it).”

The women said they were told by the athletic department to continue practicing in the pool, and the symptoms got worse.

“ They were really being, for a period of time, told to continue swimming in this pool while it had excess chlorine that was causing them serious and, in some cases, maybe permanent injury,” said Greg Stannard, the swimmers’ Los Angeles-based attorney.

Stannard said the claim, filed in Sacramento, must go through the state board of controls. When it reaches Fresno State, the school can either accept or reject the claim. If the school rejects the claim, the swimmers may then bring a formal lawsuit, Stannard said.

In mid-November, the women came to afternoon practice and refused to get in the pool.

“ It got to be too much, and it was too long,” Hitch said. “So we decided we weren’t going to swim [in the pool] anymore.”

Weakland said he knew something was wrong when he saw the swimmers.

“ When they started getting some rashes, and the rashes were only appearing on the exposed flesh around the suit and around their swim caps, it became evident it was a pool problem,” Weakland said.

The athletic department again called environmental health and safety, which took a pool-water sample to the Fresno County Health Department. That test came back at 24 parts per million.

The swimmers said, and the athletic department confirmed, the discrepancy in the two off-campus readings was due to the fact that the testing equipment used by the first company does not give readings above 10 parts per million.

“ No matter how much worse it got, they wouldn’t have been able to tell us because 10 is the max,” freshman swimmer Nika Nakamoto said.

Weakland said his understanding is that the error in chlorination happened during “a crossover in personnel who were maintaining the pool.”

“ There was some type of breakdown as far as how much chlorine was to be added to the pool,” Weakland said. “And they just over-chlorinated it. They just put too much in.”

The swimmers tell a similar story.

Facilities Management Director Robert Boyd was unavailable for comment.

Environmental Health and Safety investigated the situation and found the pool had a faulty chlorine pump and the school had been using an inaccurate testing kit. The pool was drained and refilled. The pump was replaced, and the school bought a new testing kit—one that tests up to 100 parts per million.

But the swimmers said the damage had been done.

“ As the season went on, we just realized that things weren’t getting better and nobody was getting better,” Hitch said. “The hair was starting to grow back, but breathing was definitely still a problem.”

Problems Out of the Pool

Weakland said the athletic department had all the swimmers go to the health center to get chest X-rays and to get “checked out for whatever their conditions were.”

Hitch said some swimmers chose not to go to the health center.

“A few girls didn’t even bother going because the girls that did go [said], ‘I don’t even feel like I got any answers. And it didn’t even feel like they were really looking in the right places,’ ” Hitch said. “A chest X-ray isn’t really going to show anything.”

Dr. Anthony Molina, who treated the swimmers who did go to the health center, said most people with asthma would have normal chest X-rays and said the swimmers’ chest X-rays were “unremarkable.” But he said the swimmers were having respiratory problems.

“ [The swimmers] were getting some chest tightness, some cough and some wheeze, and kind of what you would expect from chlorine,” Molina said. “It’s a chemical irritant, so you get upper-respiratory tract symptoms. You get the irritation, the discomfort in the airways, increase in secretions and that type of thing.”

Nearly everyone on the swim team also signed releases in November saying they wanted to see a pulmonary specialist. A pulmonary doctor treats patients with lung problems.

“ Anybody that wanted to see [a specialist] was going to get access to see one,” Weakland said.

But the swimmers said only three of the team members have seen a specialist.

“ I don’t know who’s supposed to make those appointments,” junior swimmer Kristi Collins said. “but whoever it is is not doing their job.”

Even the swimmers’ parents got upset when their daughters hadn’t seen a pulmonologist.

“ The school had three of the girls see a specialist and then apparently forgot all about the rest of the girls and did not make any effort to schedule them in to see the specialist,” Walt Hitch said. “The girls asked to see a specialist, only a couple of them had been allowed to go, and the rest of them apparently had been forgotten or were certainly being neglected.”

Weakland said the athletic department told the swimmers it would take care of any medical needs.

“ We basically gave them carte blanche,” Weakland said. “Whatever they wanted to get checked out, we were going to see they got checked out.”

The athletic department sent a letter, dated Nov. 25, 2002, to the swimmers’ parents. The letter, signed by athletic director Scott Johnson, stated that the “symptoms soon will disappear, and there should be no long-term effects from their exposure to the higher-than-normal chlorine level.”

Donald Batchelor has yet to see the symptoms in his daughter disappear.

Sarah Batchelor, who had the worst case of asthma among the team members previously and who seems to have suffered the most from the chlorine’s effect on her respiratory system, had an asthma attack and passed out at a team practice at Clovis West High School in December. She has been coughing up blood periodically and has been prescribed prednizone three times since October. Prednizone is a steroid which Batchelor said is a “pretty hardcore drug to be on.”

“ They just kept giving me that to try to fix my breathing and help my lungs get better,” Batchelor said. “But I don’t know if it worked. I get worse again after I finish the medicine.”

She said that before the exposure to elevated chlorine levels, she seldom had to use her nebulizer and inhaler.

“ My breathing was doing really well, better than it had ever been before,” Batchelor said. “Ever since then, it’s been really, really bad.”

Batchelor’s father said he’s never seen his daughter with breathing problems this bad.

“ [Sarah] has these ongoing health problems that are much worse than she’s had her entire life,” Donald Batchelor said. “At first I was a bit skeptical that anything like this could happen at a Cal State university. It turned out that there was a very, very severe problem.”