When my husband Larry and I lived in Northern California, near San Francisco, we didn't have a pool because summers were mostly cool with from the fog coming through the Golden Gate. In fact, when we moved into the last house we lived in in California, it had an above ground pool and we took it out because the water was always freezing cold and the days were rarely warm enough to go in.
And so, when we moved here to Florida, it wasn't particularly important to us to buy a house with a pool. But we soon found out that in a hot climate, a pool is actually a necessity. Submerging your entire body in cool water is one of the best ways to survive hot weather. A cool shower isn't quite the same. We got an above-ground pool, but didn't want to use chlorine.
Chlorine is a very toxic chemical that is easily absorbed through the skin. And our bodies absorb much more chlorine and other chemicals through the skin than from actually drinking the water. In my book Home Safe Home I wrote that a study done by the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Quality Engineering found that 29 to 46 percent of water pollutant exposure occurs through the skin in children and 50 to 70 percent in adults. A fifty pound child can absorb up to then times more contamination from swimming in a pool for an hour than drinking a quart of pool water.
This article appears in Jun 17-23, 2010.