Officials Use Google Earth To Find Unlicensed Pools

Officials in Riverhead, New York are using Google Earth to root out the owners of unlicensed pools. So far they've found 250 illegal pools and collected $75,000 in fines and fees. Of course not everyone thinks that a city should be spending time looking at aerial pictures of backyards. from the article: "Lillie Coney, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, DC, said Google Earth was promoted as an aid to curious travelers but has become a tool for cash-hungry local governments. 'The technology is going so far ahead of what people think is possible, and there is too little discussion about community norms,' she said."

Comments

When a pool fails...

[crow]

I had a friend who had a neighbor with an unlicensed above-ground pool. I'm not sure what went wrong, but one day it collapsed, sending all of the water into my friend's back yard, destroying everything there. Building permits are required for good reasons, and they're usually dirt cheap (less than 1% of the project cost). If you're hiring a contractor who doesn't get a building permit, then they're probably not doing it to save you money, but to allow them to skimp on important building code details that might end up costing you a huge amount.

Re:When a pool fails...

[DerekLyons]

So if the pool had been licensed then the water wouldn't have done as much damage to your friends back yard when it collapsed?

Without knowing what went wrong, I'd wager the scenario could run like my what happened here a few years back...
 
A guy decided to put in a new driveway, and to keep it level carved away part of the foot of a hill. The hill started to slide a little bit, so he built his own six foot tall, thirty foot long retaining wall out of concrete blocks and without benefit of a permit or inspection. Problem was, not only did he not tie the courses together, he also didn't anchor the wall back into the hill, and he didn't provide drains behind the wall. All of which are required by code, should have been specified on the plans submitted for the permit he didn't have, approved by the county engineer as part of the approval process he didn't go through, certified as performed by the licensed contractor he didn't hire, and inspected by the county after completion...
 
Within a few weeks the county found out about this (I don't recall how) and yellow tagged the house. (Which means the house could not be occupied until the work noted on the tag, in this case replacing the wall, had been properly completed.) A few weeks later, in defiance of the yellow tag, the man moved back into the house because he "didn't want his family to spend Christmas in a hotel". Four days later, during a normal (for these parts) winter rainstorm, the weight of the hill and accumulated water collapsed the wall - and the ensuing mudslide wiped out the house and killed the man, his wife, and three of their children. The only survivor was a teen aged daughter who was at a friends Christmas party.
 
So the issue isn't that the water wouldn't have done as much damage when it collapsed, but that the odds are if the pool had been properly built it would have been less likely (much less likely) to collapse in the first place.
 
Not to mention, that most home insurance policies won't cover damages caused by un permitted construction. Nor are you left with any recourse - you'll be liable if you're party to a suit that arises subsequent to any damages caused by failures in such construction.

Re:They collected $75,000...

[Anonymous Coward]

Comparably, government employees typically have salaries a good bit below that in the private sector.

Total bullshit. I used to work for the private sector at a museum that was then taken over by the federal government. When the takeover went through, I gained ridiculous pension and medical benefits, along with a $10,000+ increase in my annual salary.