UK Water Parks

[pluk]

Just come back from splashdown quaywest, been a major incident where a man died, not very impressed with how the park managed the situation as they kept the park running for 30 minutes while they were attempting CPR. No lifeguards or staff seemed to know how to deal with the situation.

Just thinking about the family with how incredibly sad this situation is.

In the first moments of such an incident there is only one consideration, and that is preservation of life. Not only the person taken ill but also everyone else present. You still have a pool full of people and you cannot just stop looking after them, that means the lifeguards remain committed to their posts and things kind of have to continue. You do an immediate evacuation and you put everyone in an element of danger at a pool, it's easy for people to get panicked especially when you'll have a lot of kids away from their parents in the building, and if you empty the pool people have to go somewhere and can easily end up hindering the first aid being given and access for whatever support is required. I'm quite sure everyone knew what they were doing, that doesn't mean they won't be human and shaken by it.

It's very easy to criticize when it's not you doing the work and with a limited view of what really needs to be considered.

 

[Enter Valhalla]

Clearing all the pools and closing the slides would have meant that large numbers of people would have congregated and this would have not allowed the family or the staff any privacy. Not to mention the fact that these days, everyone films everything on their phones.

It sounds like the park did implement a gradual closure, and I feel that the staff (let’s not forget, most lifeguards are only aged around 16-21) needed the rest of the day to process what had happened, as they’d have no doubt been very shaken by such an incident.

 

[pluk]

There was a documentary about Center Parcs sometime during COVID (okay, Covid's still here, but you know what I mean), and they said that each night all the water gets drained into a tank to make it cheaper to heat. It wasn't clear how many of their water parks did this. I don't think Center Parcs have big expanses of water like a wave pool though.

The only water that drains to tanks that I'm aware of in any centre parcs is the rapids, and even then the top outdoor pool that feeds the system stays filled and heated. Elveden stuck a room over their second outdoor pool a few years back, I imagine the heating cost contributed to that decision.

Maybe more modern or continental ones have some fancy system that actually drains all outdoor pools.

Inside the domes they don't drain any of the water away over night and they do have big wave pools. The pool water heats the dome to its tropical temperatures, so it all works in some balance. I suspect draining those pools to tank and then heating the dome to a comfortable temperature would be a false economy.