The entrance to the Coaldale Outdoor Pool. (Lethbridge News Now)

By David Opinko

“Critical failure” in Coaldale pool to be fixed while council decides on long-term solution

Dec 11, 2019 | 5:00 AM

COALDALE, AB – The people of Coaldale will be able to swim in the outdoor pool again.

In early July, staff found a “critical failure” in the pool’s filtration system, which forced the Town to shut it down for the rest of the summer.

Seven options were presented to town council in September that ranged from doing nothing to spending $25-million on a large, full-scale indoor facility.

After they consulted the community on how to proceed, Mayor Kim Craig said there was no real consensus on which option was the best, so they decided to go with the most affordable one that would still allow people to go for a swim.

At the time, the town estimated that fixing the pool would cost around $300,000, but Craig believes it would actually be closer to $250,000.

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“We have time between now and the summer season to hopefully get it fixed, and that way, it’ll buy us time to keep engaged with the community to find a long-term solution.”

Another factor in the decision was the fact that, for the rest of the summer, people in swimming programs were being bussed to the pool in Stirling. Repairing the pool would not take a significant amount of time and council did not want to have to rely on another community.

This route, however, is only a short-term fix that would extend its life by three-to-five years. The outdoor pool is nearly half-a-century old at this point.

Sometimes when an older piece of infrastructure is repaired, other problems are found that not only extend the timeframe for completing it, but also exponentially add to the costs.

Craig does not believe that would happen in this situation.

“We think it’s fairly isolated to this thing because of what the engineering firm has told us, so we don’t think we’re going to have a whole domino effect that adds a bunch of more repairs.”

Council will vote on putting out a request for proposals later this month, and assuming they get a decent deal for the project, Craig hopes to have pool operational by the Spring of 2020.

After that, the town will spend several months consulting the community again on what the future of swimming in Coaldale should look like.