PORT ANGELES — A revamped William Shore Memorial Pool will reopen at 5:30 a.m. today, a day later than originally planned.
“I wanted to say we are open today,” pool Executive Director Steve Burke told a Port Angeles Regional Chamber of Commerce audience Monday.
The 51-year-old indoor pool at 225 E. Fifth St., Port Angeles, has been closed since May 24 for $2 million worth of renovations, including energy-efficiency upgrades and a 16-foot climbing wall.
The reopening was delayed by 24 hours because wires inside a high-voltage connector in the city-owned transformer room shorted out Friday, causing an explosion from a fuse on an overhead power line.
“That was an interesting experience,” Burke said.
“Thankfully, when we put all our new equipment in — in just these last couple weeks — we had lots of surge protection that we put in with it, and all of our equipment fared very well.”
Much of City Hall next door lost power for about an hour.
The pool was built and operated by the city until 2009, when voters approved a larger recreation district to operate and finance it.
Burke described the pool as a community asset that can prevent drownings by teaching children how to swim.
It offers lessons to third-graders from nearby Jefferson Elementary School.
“One of my rules is if anybody wants to learn how to swim, we will never turn them away,” Burke said.
“We’ll figure out how to pay for it, but I don’t want anybody in this town not knowing how to swim if they want to know how to swim.
“We just have too much water around here to not have that be something that we have a priority in.”
Burke said there is a correlation between the presence of a community pool and drownings in other cities.
“We’ll figure out how to get them to pay for it, whether we’ll give them a scholarship, we’ll find someone to sponsor them,” Burke said, “but we will not turn any child away from learning how to swim.”
The first phase of the pool improvements began last year with the installation of new lights and replacement of the pool’s 53-year-old plumbing system.
“This year, we did the major phase, which was we replaced all of our equipment in our mechanical room,” Burke told about two dozen in the audience at the Port Angeles Red Lion Hotel.
“And we replaced all of our electrical service.”
A new air-handling unit is moving about twice as much air as before, resulting in drier, more comfortable conditions in the building just east of Lincoln Street.
“When you’re inside, it won’t feel stuffy and hot and wet,” Burke said.
William Shore has been converted to a salt-based pool.
Chlorine still is being used, but the salt combined with a new ultraviolet water treatment system will “kill a lot of things that chlorine doesn’t kill well,” Burke said.
“It’s working really well so far,” he said.
“When we open tomorrow, you won’t have that smell of chlorine, either.”
The lifeguard-supervised, inverted climbing wall on the west deep end of the pool is the first of its kind in the state.
Burke described the wall as a “nice addition to what we have.”
Pool officials hope the energy efficiencies will cut the $10,000-per-month electricity bill in half.
For more information about the pool, click on www.williamshorepool.org.
Reporter Rob Ollikainen can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5072, or at rollikainen@peninsuladailynews.com.
