Water slides coming to pool

It’s been a long-time goal of Holton Parks and Recreation Director Mike Reichle to get a slide or two installed at Holton’s municipal swimming pool, and this summer, Reichle’s hoping to have at least one slide installed before the pool opens for the season on Memorial Day weekend.

There’s one hitch to getting a new slide, or two, installed at Holton’s pool, however.

“We’re running into complications,” Reichle said. “Our pool’s so obsolete that we can’t just tap into the pool water like we thought we could. So we’ll have to come up with some kind of contraption that will put the pool water into a pump, and then we can put it onto the slide from there.”

According to Reichle, the two slides that have been purchased for the pool — a 10-foot-tall “vortex” slide and a smaller, seven-foot-tall “helix” slide, purchased from S.R. Smith Equipment of Canby, Ore. — require 50 gallons of water per minute to keep the slide surfaces wet for those who will use them. Reichle said he will not use a steady supply of city water to keep the slides wet.

“That’s 50 gallons per minute for an eight-hour day,” he said. “That’s a lot of water out of Banner Creek Reservoir.”

Instead, Reichle said, he intends to recycle water from the pool into a pump that will feed both slides, but the line that feeds pool water into a cleaning filter “isn’t going to be as easily accessible as we thought,” as it is located behind a stainless steel gutter in the pool.

Still, Reichle remains optimistic, as getting a slide installed at the pool has been a long-time goal of his department and for city officials past and present.

“Bob Dieckmann’s been looking for the past 10 years to get a slide,” Reichle said, referring to the former mayor. “And then (Holton City Manager) Teresa (Riley) said, let’s get two, let’s do it. I don’t know that we’ll have them both ready at the start of the season, but I promise that I can get one installed by the end of May. But I’m hoping that by Memorial Day, we’ll have two slides up that we can really show off.”

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