As of Monday, Joe Fausnaugh — the city of Toledo’s director of Parks and Youth Services — would confidently let his kids play at the Savage Park splash pad, he said, even though it has been shut down by the Toledo-Lucas County Health Department.
In May of 2023, the splash pad failed a Healt h Department inspection because it violated Makenna’s Law — a law that regulates water pressure at pools, splash pads, and water parks. As summer of 2024 commenced, the splash pad was not ready to open.
Despite many difficulties altering the mechanics of the splash pad, Mr. Fausnaugh thinks it is finally ready to safely serve the community.
“We’ve been partnering with the water distribution department and the city facilities department to adjust the controls for the splash pad,” Mr. Fausnaugh said. “It’s taken a lot of tries and some failed attempts, but we think we’ve finally got things dialed in.”
Parks and Youth Services will invite the health department to complete an inspection Tuesday morning.
After its initial inspection last year, the health department reported multiple violations. The spray height was reported to be 10 feet, exceeding the 6.21-foot maximum to maintain a safe water velocity. The water pressure could cause “significant injury,” the health department said in a Friday news release, especially considering the main demographic using the splash pad is small children.
The health department requested that an engineer confirm the water pressure complies with Makenna’s Law.
“The Toledo-Lucas County Health Department’s top priority remains the health and well-being of our staff and the community and will continue to be our guiding principle,” the health department said in Friday’s statement.
Tuesday morning’s inspection will determine if the splash pad is ready to reopen to the public, Mr. Fausnaugh said. He is hopeful that the splash pad will be open for the Fourth of July.
Community members feel it should have been open at the start of the summer.
Fixing the mechanics of the 20-year-old splash pad was complicated, Mr. Fausnaugh said, but one of the biggest difficulties was being able to prove the water pressure was safe.
“The health department doesn’t have a gauge, and we didn’t have a gauge to measure that foot per second pressure,” Mr. Fausnaugh said. “We couldn’t run to Walmart and buy a gauge; we had to develop something in house.”
“At the time, we didn’t think it was going to be that hard to come into compliance,” he said. “We thought, ‘Well we just need to make the water not shoot as high.’ But then, once we did get to work on it this spring, we realized that it’s more complicated than that.”
Mr. Fausnaugh didn’t get to work on the splash pad last May, when the initial issues were highlighted, because he didn’t want to shut it down for the summer of 2023. Considering there had been no serious injuries due to the water pressure in the last two decades, he said, he thought allowing the splash pad to stay on “made sense.”
The health department evidently agreed, as it granted Parks and Youth Services a grace period, allowing the splash pad to stay on through the summer of 2023.
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