Despite our spring snow flurry, we’re excited about the water park season just around the corner. This will be our first season with the Kelly Ogle Memorial Safety Award under our belt and we wanted to take a minute to showcase some of the winners from previous years.
Splash Pads Need Safety Surfaces: Part 4
The safety revolution that transformed dry playgrounds is long overdue for splash pads. We believe that creating similar standards for splash pads will reduce injuries and provide a significant benefit to public health, thereby creating a safer future for aquatic recreation, for our families, and for our communities.
Splash Pads Need Safety Surfacing: Part 3
From the beginning, splash pads have often been built adjacent to, or even on top of, public pools and wading pools, and so they have traditionally maintained the hard concrete “floors” of these pools. However, the practice of treating splash pads as a literal extension of the pool category is both inaccurate and dangerous. Even if splash pads began in the pool and fountain space, they have developed beyond those categories and now require a different set of safety regulations.
Splash Pads Need Safety Surfacing: Part 2
Playgrounds and splash pads are used in remarkably similar ways: children climb, run, and jump as they interact with play features. The major difference between splash pads and dry playgrounds is the presence of water. In other words, splash pads are simply playgrounds + water. As a result, they share some similar safety concerns.
Splash Pads Need Safety Surfacing: Part 1
Leading the Way To Safer Play
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.
Taking the Lead in Splash Pad Safety
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.
Splash Pads: The Non-pools
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.
Thousands of Miles, Thousands of Tiles: A Year of Life Floor Manufacturing
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.
Concrete: From a Dome In Rome to Your Home
Splash Pad Safety and Hydroplaning
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.
Against The Infernal Scourge of Aerosol Sunscreen
The Rotary Splash Pad
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.
We're Buffaloed by Bison!
This week, we were excited to hear that President Obama signed the Bison Legacy Act, making the bison our official, national mammal!
Splash Pads: What's in a name?
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.
This Summer, Design Comes Full Circle
Manufacturing News Round-Up
The Shape of Things To Come?
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:
Five Reasons To Ditch Concrete Pool Decks
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.