PUBLIC BATHS MAY BE IMPROVED.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 17879, 22 June 1926, Page 11

PUBLIC BATHS MAY BE IMPROVED.

EXPERT OFFERS SOME SUGGESTIONS. From an experience of swimming baths in many countries, a study of the subject and latest literature on it, Mr Waino Sarelius offers suggestions for improving the municipal baths in Christchurch. In an interview, he said that he did not wish to criticise the baths in a captious spirit, but merely to help to make them better, from several points of view, by reconstruction. The water lie described as above critcism, as probably the best in the world. His principal suggestion is that the dressing-boxes should be removed from their present position, and that an arrangement should be made by which no bather can possibly go into the swimming pool without being thoroughly cleansed. The dressing boxes should be tiled. This should be done not only in the public baths, but in all school baths. Whitewashing the boards, he considers, is insufficient. There should be no entrance to the swimming pool except through the dressing-boxes. Behind them there should be passages by which they are entered. The cleansing rooms should be quite separate from the swimming pool. Each cleansing room should be equipped with -wall sprays, operated automatically as soon as a bather stood under one of them. The sprays, with hot water and liquid soap, must be carefully kept apart from the swimming pool. Water should be kept off the floor of the dressing-boxes, and the surface of the .water in the swimming pool should not be near the top of the platform. There is much more risk of contamination. Mr Sarelius is convinced, through the present dressing-boxes than through the water, which is changed every twenty-four hours. He compliments Mr Breward and the staff on their efficiency, but expresses an opinion that they are too heavily handicapped by the structural disadvantages at the municipal baths. He believes that there is much more risk of contamination in the ordinary baths of institutions or of other places where people gather together. In place of the tub baths, he would have a system of vertical sprays, by which a bather gets absolutely clean water all the time.