Pool architect’s list keeps on growing

North Peace Express, Sunday, September 8, 1996
By John Geary

Victor Davies’ resumé consists of a long list of successful aquatic centres his firm has helped build. If you visit places like Maple Ridge, Merritt, Abbotsford, Matsqui, Coquitlam, Kamloops (the Canada Games pool) or Tumbler Ridge and you want to go swimming, you’ll be swimming in a pool the Victoria based architect designed.

Add Fort St. John to that list.

The new North Peace Leisure Pool is tentatively scheduled to be open for public use on Sept. 12. The official opening is not until October.

Until he began working on this pool, the farthest north he had built a pool was Tumbler Ridge. Working this far north can present some unique problems not found in more southern climates. The ever-present difficulty posed by perma frost forced Davies and UMA Projects Ltd. to come up with some special solutions.

“The foundations are on piles, and it’s set up so the ground can heave and drop without affecting any of the building,” he told Alaska Highway News while in town to supervise some of the finishing touches being put on the facility. “It’s actually quite complex.”

The construction uses something called a suspended slab. In a nutshell, it’s constructed in a way that there is a gap of two inches between the concrete base and the ground so that if any water does seep up from the ground and expands, it will expand into the gap and that way the structural integrity will not be jeopardized.

Another concern some might have is about the waterslide. How will long periods of extreme affect it?

“The water in the wave pool is constantly circulating and it has been calculated that we will lose two degrees of temperature in the water when it gets that cold, so we don’t believe it will get very uncomfortable,” said UMA construction manager Gerald Dobbs. “There are similar pools located in other towns in Western Canada which have the same types of temperatures as here and they have experienced no real problems.”

The concept of having two pools built under one roof is not a new concept. Davies said the idea of having both a leisure pool complete with water jets, a water slide and wave machine as well as a pool for fitness swimming and aquatic competitions in the same building is the way most communities choose to go these days. “If you can afford it, two pools are better than one. In a lot of communities, we’ve worked in combined both the pools into one pool, where you have length swimmers and recreational users all mixed in together. It’s a compromise. But the best solution is to have two different pools, with two different temperatures. Surveys in B.C. and Canada show that five per cent of pool users use it for competition use while 95 per cent use it for recreational purposes,” said Davies.