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This past weekend, Jan Armstrong would have much rather have had his water slides open for the public to enjoy as we finish off the end of an August heat wave.
Instead, he spent that time talking with lawyers, talking with media, and trying to figure out whether or not the Kenosee Superslides are going to open again or not.
Since Armstrong posted a video announcing the slides were being closed on Thursday, the video itself has over 11,000 views, and a Change.org petition has been started that, at the writing of this article, has over 3,700 signatures. Armstrong has been blown away with the support he’s seen.
“I don’t know a lot about how the petition started,” he said. “It was just pointed out to me by some friends that this petition had started, and to know that the local community like Wawota, Kipling, Carlyle, Kenosee Village, Moose Mountain Provincial Park area and the people with campers and summer homes here, and it was pointed out by my fiance, it’s not just this area.
“There’s people in Florida (and) there’s people in Norway that know about this park that are signing this petition. It’s crazy.”
Discover Estevan has reached out to the Saskatchewan Health Authority to learn why the decision came down, and it responded in a statement that you can read in the previous story, although reasoning for the closure was never made specific.
Armstrong says that in the statement he received, the SHA sited structural concerns with the slides themselves, a claim Armstrong says is unfounded.
“Our slides last year were never recognized but the numbers give us credit for it; we were one of the safest water parks in the country,” he said.
“With the amount of people we had come through our gates and the amount of incidents, none of which were directly slide-related, this park was one of the safest water parks in the country. Nobody could touch our numbers, and we’re really proud of that fact. This is the safest this water park has been in its 34-year history.”
Armstrong and his father took over the Kenosee Superslides before the 2019 season, and even then they had made upgrades in safety precautions before COVID-19 was even a thought.
“This year we’ve actually gel-coated all of our slides, which is a safety gel coat that makes the slides a little bit slicker but it makes them a little more durable to the wear and tear of the elements, and makes it faster and more fun and actually really brightens them up quite a bit,” he said. “We’ve now obviously added some sanitation procedures to all of the tubes in our park.”
Armstrong continued: “We have a crack maintenance team. Some of these guys have been working on water slides for seven, eight years, and these guys know their stuff. They’ve worked with fibreglass for years, they understand where to look for any problems in the fibreglass, how to make any repairs in the fibreglass that we have in the slides, and they’re just amazingly talented and gifted people who check these slides three times a day, and if there’s a problem in the slides we don’t open it.”
The park has only been open since July this year due to the pandemic, running two four-hour sessions during the day that only allow 150 people in the park at a time and are split up so that proper sanitation protocols can be performed before the second session.
COVID-19 has not been the only uncontrollable struggle that the park has seen since Armstrong took over.
In their first year running the park in 2019, the Kenosee Superslides opened late in the year thanks to slide upgrades, and an abnormal amount of rain in September made them shut down early.
Still, Armstrong is hopeful. The amount of support they have seen in such a short time has him hopeful that the slides will be operational again soon.
“I am so pleased that there are so many people out there that are so passionate about this little water park in the middle of a forest in the prairies that shouldn’t rightly be there and a water park in the middle of that forest that shouldn’t rightly be there,” he said.
“We’re two hours from a major centre and yet we have, on a regular year, 50,000 to 70,000 people come through our gates. That’s five per cent of the population of this province, and these people are coming out in droves to support this little park and I can’t be grateful enough for the support that we’ve seen online.”
The SHA has not issued any other response regarding the Superslides since the initial statement it gave.
