LAFAYETTE — The closure of chlorine producing plant in Lake Charles is the source of a nationwide shortage of the pool cleaning chemical.
BioLab chlorine plant was one of the nation's biggest chlorine suppliers, but it burned down last year after Hurricane Laura. This on top of the pandemic has led to a high demand for chlorine tabs, but not much supply.
It's being reported chlorine prices could spike up to 70% this summer, which is a huge difference compared to last year in 2020. It's causing some to make some adjustments to how they clean their swimming pools.
"It's quite unique," owner of Cricket's Pool And Spa World said. Cricket Benoit says they're seeing a decrease in a specific form of chlorine tablets, called Trichlor.
"We're not able to buy full pallets of tablets like we used to," Benoit said. "Then the sizes have been reduced. Whereas, we don't have all the variation in sizes anymore. We're limited now only to 25 and 50 pound bucket sizes. "
She says before they could purchase as much as they wanted, but now there's a limit.
However, Benoit says other forms of chlorine are readily available. In the meantime, she says there are ways pool owners can limit their use to the chlorine they already have.
"I'm stressing to our homeowners that proper water balance is going to help them keep their chlorine consumption down," Benoit said. "It's something we've always done, but now it's more important than ever so they're not using as much chlorine. We're shifting to some of the other things like the UV-Ozone and the salt generators are starting to kind of all pick up a little bit to counter the sanitizer, the Trichlor tablets that we're all used to. "
She added, "physical maintenance of your pool is very important so that you can keep your chlorine consumption down so it doesn't have to work so hard on all the debris that gets in there."
