Omoreno80:
Irrespective of the MILFS at the pool, you do have to pay attention to lateral loads on the deck and properly bracing it and/or tie it into the building. In the residential wood deck design guide I’m looking at, Min. Reqr’mts., item 7, second page says “This document does not address wind and seismic design issues.” God help us, I guess they still expect us to apply some engineering judgement and experience in our designs. ASCE 7 might be used as a guide for wind loads, but after reading 60 or 70 pages of that, spending hours looking for the meaning and value of some obscure multiplying factors and running you computer for an hour or two; you might just take the projected area of the deck, double or triple that since the wind will be applied to many joists, not just the rim joist, and apply 15-20 lbs./sq.ft. and call it good. The bigger question in terms of lateral stability of the deck is, where would the worst location be for three or four drunken, 300 lb. defensive linemen, swaying in unison, to impress the cheerleaders and other guests? That’s a loading parallel to the ledger, but 10-12' away from the bldg. at the handrail, applying a high tension component at one end of the ledger, corner of the deck. Or, a group of people running to one handrail to see some commotion. That pulls the whole ledger away from the bldg. And, I suppose you’ll have trouble finding those in the codes also. I have trouble calculating those forces too. But, those are the types of loads which more often than not peel a deck away from its ledger or the building, when not connected or braced properly. And remember, jst. hardware has very poor strength values when loaded along the axis of the jst.
Obviously, you have a different problem if you have privacy walls, or several different levels of deck, or some of these wildly unsymmetrical deck plans. Also, a very heavy deck in EQ country needs some special attention.