Repairs Made to Mineola Pool Slide Before Opening Day

Mineola residents who take a ride down the slide at the may be grateful to know that it was recently restored to mitigate about 18 years of wear and tear from usage.

The slide, built around 1994, began to show “surface degradation” on the fiberglass slide about 3 years ago according to superintendent of public works Tom Rini. The damage was first noted just before the opening of the pool and village crews were able to mediate the damage by using an epoxy coating.

“Unfortunately that is really just a stop-gap that we were able to do for the last couple of years,” Rini said at the June 6 meeting of the at , noting that the village had brought in a fiberglass professional that specializes in water slides. “Last year we did have some incidents where that epoxy coating was really starting to pull off but we were able to keep up with it by sanding it down, the problem now is the more we do that the more it moves back and it’s getting to be a problem that we really have to address properly.”

The repair process involves stripping the entire fiberglass shell of the entire slide – about 20 sections – via a chemical process down to it’s base fiberglass. The village would then need to respray on a new gel coat to preserve the slide structure.

Rini said that he was able to find three contractors who are able to do this type of work, “but it’s really the first bit of real maintenance we’ve had to do.”

The lowest bid for the project was $32,875, which the village treasurer felt is an amount that the 2012-13 pool budget can cover and which would have the slide ready . Rini estimated that the cost of the slide in 1994 was about $100,000 and to buy the same equipment today would be between $180,000-200,000.