City ready to make waves

The huge stainless steel swimming pool at the heart of Windsor's new aquatic centre is only 19 weeks away from being filled with 1.4 million gallons of water.

The chaotic work site doesn't look close to completion, but construction of Windsor's $77.6-million indoor water park is about to move into the home stretch, city officials were told during a tour before the project shut down for Christmas.

Both concrete dive towers have been poured, and the balcony around the two-storey glass lobby facing north to Detroit is taking shape. Installers have finished torquing 30,000 bolts into place on the custom-built competition pool, and the final structural steel for the fun park side of the seven-pool complex will spring up over the next two weeks.

On Jan. 7, give or take a day, contractors will turn on the centre's gas furnaces for the first time to warm up the recently enclosed western half of the structure. Tile installers need the heat to lay a few acres of ceramic flooring in time for the 47th International Children's Summer Games scheduled for Aug. 14.

The cost of all that ceramic will be about $1.3 million, says contractor Max De Angelis. It will take a crew of eight people weeks to lay all that flooring as the project rockets toward its handover deadline of June 21.

The water park side of the building to the east, which will house a half dozen amusement park water features when it opens six months later, will be floored with "soft walk" material to protect children's feet. The floor of the big pool will be vinyl.

Five city councillors, top administrators and parks officials charged with bringing the project in on time and on budget were wowed during a tour of the building on Dec. 20.

"Fantastic. Just fantastic," Coun. Hilary Payne murmured to himself 30 minutes into an inspection of the three-storey structure. Payne became an early proponent of building a world-class aquatic centre in Windsor after touring a similar installation in his native Ireland.

It may be just starting to look big from the outside, but from the inside the place is impressively huge, from its 1,600-spectator capacity to the spacious health club overlooking the fun park and the rentable activity rooms.

The basement, which most visitors will never see, is a Borg-like maze of pumps, filter tanks, cisterns and electrical controls. It's lined with miles and miles of PVC water pipe and 10inch steel heating and cooling lines from Windsor's downtown district energy system.

In the centre of the basement is a massive concrete bunker the size of a small bungalow - a surge tank to keep water levels properly balanced in the main pool. Designed by Myrtha Pools, the three-bay swimming hole (diving, laps, and recreation) has special gutters designed to keep the waves, or "chop" levels down, to help swimmers post Olympic competition times.

Two movable bulkheads will keep the three bays separate, so that different groups can use the pool at the same time for different purposes; competitive swimmers prefer cooler water temperatures of 78 F, while seniors taking some exercise will want the water at 80 F and up. Practising divers like it up to 82.

"This will be the only pool in Canada with that feature," says Don Sadler, Windsor's retired parks and rec boss who is supervising the project on contract for taxpayers. While still on staff, he also oversaw construction of the WFCU arena complex.

They've made some changes to the original plans for the aquatic centre, and the kids and competitors who are expected to be the centre's main customers will probably benefit the most from them.

For instance, while there will be no windows on the competition pool for safety reasons, extra windows have been added on the building's eastern side. That's so people waiting for a ride at the downtown bus station on a wintry day can gaze in with envy upon those cavorting on the double FlowRider surfing machine.

There are only 50 double FlowRid-ers in use worldwide, and none yet in Canada. The other features on the amusement side of the building will include a wave pool, toddler pools, huge slides and a lazy river float ride.

There are no windows on the big pool because glare on the water can cause deadly or crippling accidents for divers plunging off the high tower. "We were told by the experts to be very careful about how much light gets in," says Onorio Colucci, the city's treasurer and a member of the executive committee overseeing construction of the pool centre.

Windsor has consulted widely to get the project right: showers and infrared heaters will be installed underneath the dive towers, because divers must carefully balance their body temperatures during competition. A fully connected media room has been added, for international meets which Mayor Eddie Francis is pushing to become a regular occurrence in the building.

The project is still on budget, the executive committee was told. But there are plans for some last-minute upgrades similar to those made at the WFCU Centre that could improve public enjoyment of the building. They're trying to make it perfect.

"There are no more surprises," Sadler told the committee about costs. While engineers had contingency plans to cope with the usual bad soil and other underground horrors often encountered on Windsor's soggy construction sites, they found none. That saved hundreds of thousands of dollars.

"We discovered that the site had very good soil - in Windsor, who woulda thunk? So what we have now is the opportunity for some enhancements" with the savings, Sadler said.

Among the other unbudgeted extras being considered, the building committee is debating spending an extra $100,000 to upgrade the centre's hallway floors with a coating of non-slip epoxy to keep running kids safe from falls. They are also looking at installing a giant video screen on the eastern exterior of the building to promote events inside, and a sign on Riverside Drive.

Fulvio Valentinis, one of five councillors on the steering committee, has been demanding some kind of design change to break up the monotony of a two-block-long stretch of blue siding. Neighbours are already complaining about its bleak western face, he said.

Colucci, the money man, vetoed all of the extras last week. "Let's put these (suggestions) on the back burner until the last possible moment until we see how the budget goes," he told the committee.

Naming rights have yet to be determined for the building, which will also affect the final price tag. Unusually for a major government project anywhere in the world today, the aquatic centre is being paid for entirely in cash rather than public debt. About $21 million has already been paid to contractors so far, Colucci said, and the project will be paid off during the fiscal year it opens.

Francis says the new energy-wise aquatic centre will also be much cheaper to staff and to operate than its aging predecessors around the city.

De Angelis says he thinks the centrepiece of the project is something that employees were just unwrapping from its concrete formwork last week as the city hall suits were touring the site: the 10-metre-high diving tower at the south end of the big pool.