Floating Vinyl Liner - After massive rainfall

[jpearson]

I live in South Central Kansas and we had 4"-6" of rain in about a 6 hour timeframe overnight. When I woke up this morning, the pool was completely full and the liner had come undone in the corner allowing water to get in behind the liner (see attached pic).

For reference, this is a brand new 20 mil Merlin liner that is 1 week old (liner installation was complete on 6/5/15). This is my first season as a pool owner and for obvious reasons this has me freaked out a bit.

I have contacted the pool dealer that installed the liner - waiting for a call back. In the mean time, what should I do/not do until I can have them out to look at it? I don't want to make a bad situation worse at this point. I did pump the pool down to about 2" below the liner bead to help keep any other areas of the liner from coming undone. The pump is off now and I am not circulating water.

The main area of issue is the corner where the liner came unattached. However, water did settle under the liner in the shallow end and there is a pretty significant wrinkle going down the slope into the deep end to the drain area.

Thanks in advance for any help/insights on how to handle this.

 

[danpik]

Is that standing water I see outside the pool???? I am willing to bet the water behind the liner is not from the pool but is instead from the ground. That is what causes a liner to float. Once the ground water and the pool water reach the same level, there is effectively no weight on the liner.

 

[jpearson]

Is that standing water I see outside the pool???? I am willing to bet the water behind the liner is not from the pool but is instead from the ground. That is what causes a liner to float. Once the ground water and the pool water reach the same level, there is effectively no weight on the liner.

Yes, that is standing water. You are correct, we had approx 16 in of rain in May and the 5" last night completely saturated the ground. I did talk with the pool company today and they recommended leaving it alone at this point and waiting for the ground water to recede.

my concern at this point is that the ground has a very high clay content and it might take a long time for the water under the liner to recede. I am on the schedule for the pool company to come reset the liner once the ground water goes away.

Many instinct is to get a small pump and pump as much off behind the liner as possible to speed up the process and keep larger issues from developing. I should also add that we have more rain in the forecast for today and the next 3 days....

So so the question now becomes....should I let it be and wait a few days to see if the water goes away or try to pump what I can out from behind the liner? All four walls are now bulging due to the water behind the liner.



Thanks again for thoughts/suggestions.

 

[carpenter333]

First off, sorry to see this happen.

The thing I would want to attack first is future prevention. I am not sure how long you have been there with that pool but if it happens once it likely will happen again.

That being said - I would be looking to excavate the back portion behind the iron and re-route that water.

I had a similar situation and used a 12" drainage pipe with holes drilled inside and attached it to the head of a skimmer (just so it didn't look as strange on the deck) cut into my concrete near where the problem was.
This allowed me to manually drop in a submersible pump to remove water away from the walls of the pool. This was a temporary solution until I could find ways to re-route water from all aspects of the yard.

For me this meant re-arranging downspouts, creating French drains ect.

 

[bdex]

I too am sad to see this.

We are in central Illinois and it has been very similar here in the last few weeks with the rain. It seems 2" some days and 5" others.

Totally crazy.

If your PB is going to take care of it and it is a warranty issue I would not touch it.

Otherwise pumping out the water with a small pump cannot hurt. Just pump it as far away from the pool as you can.

In the future I would plan on spending some money to remedy the situation via drains that direct the rain water away from the pool area. Carpenter333 is on the right track with French drains. When I built my pool 3 years ago I put a 4" perforated pipe in a sock all around the base that was piped all of the way out to the rear portion of the yard with my down spouts. The back 1/4 of my property gets very wet when it rains a lot like this, but we planted river birch and bald cypress trees and they are loving it.


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