A teacher in charge of pool upkeep in Japan racked up a $27,000 water bill after leaving a tap running for months in an effort to prevent Covid spread.
In the belief that keeping the pool free of Covid would be easier if the faucet was always open, the instructor, who has not been named, kept the tap running from late June until early September.
Normally, chlorine and filtering machines maintain the pool water’s quality, “but the teacher somehow got the wrong idea that pouring new water in would also do the trick and even help prevent Covid,” local education board official Akira Kojiri told AFP.
The running tap was periodically noted by other members of the team, but the guilty colleague quickly turned it back on after they had shut it off.
4,000 metric tons of extra water were consumed in little over two months, according to Kojiri, which is enough to fill the pool 11 times over.
According to reports, Yokosuka’s local government is now requesting that the school’s head teacher and two other administrators foot half of the $27,000 cost.
“We deeply apologise to our residents for causing (financial) damage to our city,” Yokosuka authorities said in a statement.
