by Marvin Hlynka, Whitewater West Industries
The Water Park Industry has grown up and moved out of its parent’s house. There still are modest roadside parks with a couple of slides and a pool, but they are the exception today. Water parks typically are sophisticated businesses, professionally managed by people with extensive training and experience. A stand-alone water park is a business that shares many of the methods and problems that amusement and theme parks have long had – just on a different scale. Even those distinctions are blurring.
Naturally, changes in business conditions motivate evolution and adaptation. Our clients and our company have had to change, grow, adapt and diversify. Since we are still here after 25 years that means we did it right. As with many industries, consolidation and convergence came to wet fun. Amusement and theme parks added water parks to their properties, either by buying or building or both. This has kept us very busy and there is still no end in sight. It has also raised the bar for designers and builders from where it was in the early days. We are participating in developing the new waterslide design standards through ASTM with other stakeholders.
The top waterslide manufacturers are now sophisticated and professional specialty construction companies. We work in a rapidly evolving field driven by the demands of our clients, new ideas often emerge from unexpected places, demands of regulators and the reality of costs. Global scope is the rule. We have done work on every continent except Antarctica (special discounts are available to check that one off!). Our work is highly technical, but we have not lost sight of the simple fact that our products must be fun. Yet there is still an art to slide design. Even today, accurate computer modeling of ride behavior has not been successful.
Our experience with amusement and theme park clients led us years ago to design “dry” rides using the basic materials and techniques of waterslides. These rides have a unique fun dimension in that unlike traditional rides the vehicles do not ride on a rail or fixed path. Riders therefore experience a different feel to the ride. Our clients like them because they are very simple and relatively cheap. Our newest rides cross over wet/dry boundaries even more, and mechanically driven rides are now found inside water parks. This type of ride may even be used as a literal bridge between “wet” and “dry” entertainment sites. We will soon offer rides that can vary how wet people get depending on the weather.
We have also had fun making crazy ideas work. We once got a call from a consultant who wondered if we could build a slide through an aquarium filled with sharks. Like so many jobs in the amusement business it was a simple idea that took a huge technical effort to make it work, and appear seamless to the customer.
We further diversified by developing and offering aquatic play systems. These come in a wide range of sizes with the largest being built as huge park icons. These systems offer direct hands-on play for kids of all sizes and capabilities. Toys are the key features where we explore how many things kids can do with water. Exploration and discovery of play areas with interaction and playful competition between small or large groups is a quickly evolving design principle. The large units have significant slides as well as toys. Our first large unit client was pleased as we commissioned it to find that he finally had a place for the little kids as well as the big ones. It was like an entire water park in a single unit. We have a job in the office right now that is three times bigger than any previous unit and will be the world’s largest when complete.
We have bolstered our production capabilities with themed decoration where these units can be made to appear as a tree-house, or medieval fortress, or fishing boat, or abandoned factory. Even though the final product is whimsical, design and production is a significant technical challenge. We developed design tools to produce detailed engineering drawings for a 4000 part unit in under a week. We have high efficiency fabrication shops that turns out hundreds of parts each day.
Those other product lines now form a large chunk of our business, but our bread and butter are still waterslides. We have added several new rides over the last few years and improved the mature rides. New vehicles, new features, new design concepts keep the catalogue fresh.
We have found new and non-traditional clients to replace segments of the market that are in decline. Municipal work has dropped but there is great vitality in resort development in the US and Europe. After many years of drought, Japan is coming back.
Waterslides will become more sophisticated, themed, and interactive with the riders. We are working on a major Hybrid ride concept that offers unique ride experience and play interaction between riders, and people in the queue or other riders or game items. Play will become more sophisticated, perhaps even educational. The future is a wealth of possibilities.
Marvin Hlynka is VP Special Projects for Whitewater West Industries Ltd, Richmond British Columbia, Canada. He is a Professional Engineer and a member of the ASTM F24 committee. In 15 years with Whitewater he has worked on many interesting projects and appeared in TV documentaries on behalf of the company. Before Whitewater he designed bridge and building components.
