Does pool capacity predict the number of poop incidents? The answer: results hazy.
Exploratory analysis of NYC's outdoor public pool season data from 2023-2024.
I recently read this article from The Gothamist where they mapped the number of hours that pools were closed because people pooped in them. I noticed that some of the larger pools were shut down for more hours. I know that Red Hook Pool, for example, is huge. Its capacity is over 1,000 people, and it's one of the larger dots on the map.
I was curious to see if there's a relationship between the size of a pool and the number of poop incidents, especially since I frequent a bunch of these in the summer with my two kids. Are there more poop incidents simply because there are more swimmers? Or do some pools just have more offenders, whatever the reason?
Types of pools
Distribution of pool types according to size and purpose. It's unclear what "Intermediate" means exactly, but they represent most of the pools. Wading pools are usually on the same property as a larger pool.
The largest and smallest pools
By pool volume in cubic feet.
Click the button to toggle between the two charts.
Swimmers per session
Average number of pool attendees per session. There are usually two sessions per pool, morning and afternoon. Some pools have a third extended session, but most don't.
Poop closures per week
The pool seasons opens in the last week of June and runs until mid September.
The parks department defines a Category 1 situation as a solid poop and Category 2 as liquid poop or vomit. The numbers I ended up with are different than those in the Gothamist article which states that Staten Island's Lyons Pool had 15 poop incidents.
It was difficult to accurately count Category 1 incidents outside of the column that incidates that a session opened late because of a problem, so maybe they have more information than I do on how to intepret the data. There may be many more Category 1 incidents than shown here.
Poopiest pools
As mentioned above, these counts are much more accurate for Category 2 situations. I was horrified to see that Red Hook Pool, my usual haunt, is the one that had the most.
Poop incidents by pool size
Do larger pools get more poops? Maybe. This chart shows no statistically significant correlation (R-squared = 0), but without better info about Category 1 situations I'm not sure I'm able to tell for sure.
Hover over each dot to see the pool name. Blue dots are pools that may have had no poop incidents at all, but that might be due to errors in my counting method.