Last month, in the heat of summer, Annette Schreiner got to her local pool just in time to see a police officer posting a decree informing residents that the pool, closed since December, would not be reopening. “When the town learned that the pool was closing, people didn’t understand,” Ms. Schreiner said. “Why would you close a pool when there’s a heat wave every summer?”The reason, said officials where she lives in Montlhéry, just south of Paris, is that the pool had become too expensive to maintain. An increasing number of municipalities in France, where energy has become more expensive and water is ever scarcer, are coming to the same conclusion. The problem is limited to a relative handful of municipalities in a vast system with more than 6,000 public pools and open-air basins in France, a network denser than those in neighboring countries like Germany and Britain.

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Persons: Annette Schreiner, Ms, Schreiner Locations: Montlhéry, Paris, France, Germany, Britain