It’s hard to overstate just how much winning this award means to us. You can see by the grins on the faces of the people who accepted the plaque on stage that we were thrilled to be recognized by the board for the work we have done over the past five years helping to keep guests at waterparks safer while they play.
Readers of this blog will likely remember that splash pad safety is something of an obsession around Life Floor. After years of attending industry trade shows, doing sales talks, and even participating in parks and rec town hall meetings, we’ve realized that safety regulation has severely lagged for splash pads.
Ultimately, splash pad safety standards should be determined not by superficial similarities to pools, but by considering how people actually use splash pads. Basically, kids treat splash pads as playgrounds. They walk, run, and jump on splash pads, they play tag on splash pads. The primary mode of movement around a splash pad is definitely not swimming, and the primary risk is a slip-and-fall injury, not drowning.
Tiles Produced in Madison: 30,545
Last July set us off to a relatively modest start as just 12 tiles were sold off the line -- though there were numerous trials being run at the same time -- but the pace has picked up nicely as we sold more than 5,000 tiles produced at Falcon in June, 2016. Those 30,545 tiles translate to more than 60,000 linear feet or more than 200 football fields, and they’ve ended up all over the world. From the decks of Carnival cruise ships and waterparks in Dubai to the Florida Aquarium and a splash pad in Tennessee, Life Floor tiles have ended up in a huge variety of places.
Hydroplaning occurs on splash pads when there is simply too much water accumulating on the surface of the splash pad. When this happens, children (and adults) are no longer running on the ground, they're running on water. And just as a puddle can cause a car to hydroplane, this water can get between your feet and the ground and send you flying.
Life Floor was chosen for this splash pad for safety, design, and durability. While Great Southern Recreation encouraged the customers to consider a safety surface from the start, Rotary also wanted to include their logo in the splash pad, and they knew that paint applied to any surface was likely to wear away. With Life Floor, not only will this attraction be much safer than conventional splash pads, the design will also last for years.
This week, we were excited to hear that President Obama signed the Bison Legacy Act, making the bison our official, national mammal!
Here at Life Floor, we think a lot about splash pads. We design and manufacture splash pad surfacing; we play on splash pads, too, and sometimes, we even invite our kids. As our involvement in aquatics has grown, we began to notice something unusual: no one seems entirely sure what to call these things. There’s actually a pretty wide variety of names, including: splash pad, splash deck, spray ground, aquatic play pad, rain deck, spray deck, spray pad, spray pool, and spray zone.
Here in Minnesota, we tile the plane all the time, but almost always with squares. We have big dreams to create a hexagon tile (harder to do overseas, but with our manufacturers next door in South Dakota, it’s a possibility we’re excited to explore), but apparently there are even more sides to the argument for different tile shapes, as we learned this week from The Guardian:
Without cement, the world would be a very different place. The Romans used it to build and maintain their empire, it remains the material of choice for deep footings or foundations, and it simply can’t be beat if you’re building a hydroelectric dam. However, if you’re installing a pool and not, say, recreating the Pantheon in your backyard, there are better options available. Here are five good reasons to pick something other than concrete or cement for your in-ground pool deck.
Choose a pool that fits your personality and lifestyle: Perhaps you’d rather have a winding, lazy river in which to relax, or perhaps you'd rather spend your pool-time swimming laps. Infinity pools are especially beautiful and can compliment waterfront views, while adding slides or diving boards make your pool more entertaining and kid-friendly. In general, think about how you would like to use your pool and how you will realistically use it the most, and try to combine the two to fit your lifestyle.
Splash pads and spraygrounds are one of the few water features that show up not only in water parks, but also in municipal parks and even in private residences. Getting a sprayground to stand out against the competition can be tricky, but here are five simple ways to make guests' experience memorable for all the right reasons.
In the early months of 2014, the Town of Westfield asked MRC Rec and Life Floor to help them with an exciting challenge. They wanted to upgrade the splash pad at their Memorial Pool Complex, but they also wanted to preserve the existing floor design, which had been designed and chosen by members of the community.