pools... RE: Re[6]: [at-l] weight/use efficiency & Guns

[Bob Cummings <ellen@clinic.net> (Bob C.)]

"...the number of community pools shrinks continually, as municipal, YMCA, and
club owners attempt to deal with insurance costs. With that swimming skills
deteriorate. With that, kids -- *teenagers* -- are drowning in amazing numbers,
in, off all places, the idiot holding ponds dug around apartment complexes to
hold drainage water." claims Sloetoe.

 I can't speak for the rest of the nation, but more and more swimming pools are
 built in Maine each year (that may be because we are wiser here in the north).
 
 But the holding ponds built around apartment complexes are not "idiot"
 inventions. Apartment complexes are built on what used to be open land where
 rain fall could natural seep into the ground water. The holding ponds are an
 attempt to gather that rain water and allow at least some of it to return to
 underground supplies as nature intended.

 It is these underground water reservoirs that produce the springs and streams
 that we all love so much when we hike the trail. When we pave the natural
 landscape we destroy the source of fresh water that we need so that we can
 continue to be rich enough to build more apartment complexes.

  The holding ponds also store rain water and thus reduce the flash floods that
  otherwise occur after every heavy rain.

  Weary