Getting killed by a pool pump

My house has a pool, which I maintain myself. A pool always needs to have its water circulated through a filter for several hours a day in order to keep it clean. The filter is a large barrel with a strong clamp that holds the top and bottom halves together. My filter has a prominent warning label that warns me not to try to open the clamps while the pump is on, and it shows a cartoon of a person being struck by the top half of the pump. The cross-sectional area of the filter barrel is 0.25 m². Like most pressure gauges, the one on my pool pump actually reads the difference in pressure between the pressure inside the pump and atmospheric pressure. The gauge reads 90 kPa. What is the force that is trying to pop open the filter?

. If the gauge told us the absolute pressure of the water inside, we'd have to find the force of the water pushing outward and the force of the air pushing inward, and subtract in order to find the total force. Since air surrounds us all the time, we would have to do such a subtraction every time we wanted to calculate anything useful based on the gauge's reading. The manufacturers of the gauge decided to save us from all this work by making it read the difference in pressure between inside and outside, so all we have to do is multiply the gauge reading by the cross-sectional area of the filter:

F = PA

= (90 × 103 N/m²)(0.25 m²)

= 22000 N

That's a lot of force!