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From the City of Thibodaux:
As COVID-19 continues to evolve and change the way we go about everyday life, the City of Thibodaux has been faced with making tough decisions about an uncertain future. Most recently, we have discussed the 2020 opening of the Thibodaux Municipal Pool. Throughout the pool conversations, we have discussed topics involving public health, requirements for social distancing, adequate staffing, financial impacts, and the safety of pool users. City Administration has been working the past few weeks to determine a viable plan that would allow us to open the pool while implementing social distancing guidelines and ensure patron safety. Unfortunately, we were unsuccessful in finding a suitable plan that we were comfortable with, resulting in the decision to keep the Thibodaux Municipal Pool closed for the 2020 season.
Please know that this decision was not made lightly. There are many moving pieces that work to make the pool a safe place for users each year, and adding a global pandemic to the mix created an extremely difficult path to navigate.
You may find yourself asking, are we pre-mature in making this decision, and can we not wait until mid-summer to open in hopes that health regulations are lifted? The answer is no. One of the moving pieces to opening the pool is the hiring and training of lifeguards and supervisors. If we open mid-summer, we risk not having enough trained staff to properly run the pool. This would put both our staff and the public at risk. Additionally, it is not reasonable to think that the pool can be opened at a moment’s notice. Typically, we are already underway in the opening of the pool at this point. To get the pool up to code, at minimum, the deck has to be cleaned and chemicals need to be balanced and ready for health department inspection, and that all takes time. It is not fiscally responsible to prepare the pool for opening with uncertainty about the future; thousands of dollars have the potential to be lost if we prepare the pool and cannot open on time or cannot open at all. Again, we have talked through many scenarios, but we could not find one that we could confidently put into place this summer.
While the Thibodaux Municipal Pool will remain closed through the entirety of 2020, it is the intention of the City of Thibodaux to try and open the Splash Pad at some point this summer. An opening date will be determined based on local, state, and CDC recommendations and announced at a later date.
Photo by Juan Patlan.
