Skip to content

New look for Fountain Park Pool

Reopens July 31

St. Albert swimmers will get to slip down a kid’s-sized water slide this Monday as Fountain Park Pool reopens after more than a year’s worth of renovations.

Fountain Park Recreation Centre will reopen to the public July 31. The pool has been closed since May 2022 for some $16.5 million in repairs and upgrades.

The city originally planned to close the facility for five months to replace the 45-year-old building’s ventilation and electrical systems, said senior project manager Karsen Zwiers. When crews ripped out the ventilation ducts, however, they found the concrete slab between the competition and leisure pools was cracked and corroded and had to be replaced. Since this would involve smashing the tiles atop the slab, the city decided to move up a bunch of maintenance they had originally planned to do in 2024 (such as re-tiling the pool) to this year, resulting in a longer closure and a savings of about $500,000.

New look

Crews spent the last 15 months replacing some 396 m of duct, 991 m of pipe, and 4,766 square metres (about 11 basketball courts) of tile in the facility, Zwiers said. They also redid the parking lot, which now sports six electric vehicle charging stations.

Guests should notice that the three doors to the pool’s three change rooms are now gone, replaced by open halls. The “family” change room has also been redesigated as the "universal” room to be more inclusive, Zwiers said. The sinks, showers, benches, and change-room doors have been upgraded, and the old coin-operated lockers have been replaced with free ones with electronic locks.

The pool area looks much brighter with its new blue-and-white paint job (applied using some 3,305 L of paint), all LED lighting, and blue-and-white floor tiles (which replace the drab brown ones that had been there for decades). Crews have also added a steel railing to the leisure pool to make it wheelchair-accessible.

New to the facility is a kid’s-sized water slide and water play area, which replaces the older, much-larger spiral water slide. City associate director of recreation facilities Kelly McConnell said the city went with a smaller slide because it was wheelchair accessible and cost a third as much as the bigger one.

Zwiers said Fountain Park used to draw a lot of complaints about humidity and air circulation. These problems were caused by the facility’s two HVAC units not working together.

Zweirs said crews have replaced those units with a giant, house-sized one that comes with a dehumidifier and a heat-recovery system, allowing crews to recover heat that would otherwise be blasted outdoors with the waste air and use it to heat pool water. These and other improvements (such as triple-pane windows) should cut Fountain Park’s energy use by 30 per cent.

Glad it’s back

Shane Downey, general manager of the Olympian Swim Club (which operates out of about six Edmonton-area pools including Fountain Park), said it was great to hear that Fountain Park was reopening.

“Fountain Park was a huge satellite pool for us,” he said, with many of the club’s top swimmers living in St. Albert.

Downey said the club lost many members when Fountain Park closed as not everyone could commute to Edmonton to swim. Its return should give more young athletes a chance to build their social and swimming skills.

“We’re extremely excited to be back,” Downey said.




Kevin Ma

About the Author: Kevin Ma

Kevin Ma joined the St. Albert Gazette in 2006. He writes about Sturgeon County, education, the environment, agriculture, science and aboriginal affairs. He also contributes features, photographs and video.
Read more

Comments
push icon
Be the first to read breaking stories. Enable push notifications on your device. Disable anytime.
No thanks