Gheluvelt Park’s splashpad having to close on some of the hottest days of the year is “embarrassing” for the council.
Managing director David Blake made the admission in an Environment committee meeting at the Guildhall on Tuesday (July 23).
The splashpad has been closed for much of the past week with Worcester City Council blaming technical faults.
An investigation is now underway to find out if it is coming to the “end of its working life”.
The first of two closures came last Friday (July 19), as temperatures in the city soared and schools broke up for the summer holidays.
“Aside from the technical issues, I’m acutely aware of how embarrassing it looks for the council in terms of PR,” said Mr Blake. “It’s very embarrassing in terms of our performance.”
Cllr Karen Lewing asked: “Everyone will have noticed that the splashpad has been out of action on probably the hottest day of the year, and I wanted to ask what officers were going to do about it please, whether there’s any plan to make sure that it’s open for the rest of the summer?”
Mr Blake said: “We need to produce a report that sets out how many times the splashpad has failed, what the duration of each failure was, what the specific reason for the failure – whether it’s a small number of recurring failures or whether its a very large number of somewhat random failures because that would imply that the whole of the splash pad is perhaps reaching the end of its working life, rather than a particular problem with a component failure.
“I’ve asked, also, for a breakdown of the costs in terms of are the repairs being met through a maintenance agreement or are we paying on an individual basis for the repairs.
“And I’ve also asked for the response times for the repairs, if we’re bringing in an external organisation to do that. So there is a whole raft of data that we need in order to determine whether this is a systemic failure of the whole of the splash pad.
“Until we get those answers I can’t give anymore information, but I’m expecting quite a detailed analysis.”
Cllr Lewing said: “It’s really important we get satisfaction with parks and play areas – and I really think this is something that will be on people’s radar in the next annual survey if we don’t sort it out.”
Cllr Andrew Cross said he believes the splash pad was installed in June 2010.
(Worcester News 25/07/2024)