What London's largest pool looks like when its 3 million litres of water is drained
The Canada Games Aquatic Centre will reopen on Sept. 14
Have you ever wondered what the pool at the Canada Games Aquatic Centre looks like when its drained? CBC London stopped by this week as crews did their annual deep clean.
The maintenance and cleaning typically takes about three weeks, but an extra week was added this year because of significant work on the pool's movable floor.
"Once the water is drained, which takes about 12 to 15 hours, then we'll get in and do some necessary regrouting of tile work. We'll do some repairs and maintenance to the filter system and then we get in and actually physically power wash the pool and give it buff up," said Scott Preece, the manager of recreation operations at the City of London.
The pool, located at 1045 Wonderland Road North, is home to London's Olympic-sized pool, which also has one to 10 metre high diving boards. The pool holds almost more than three-million litres of water when it's full.
"Our staff do a pretty good job day-to-day on maintaining the hairballs and those kinds of things that happen when you have a pool running under the movable floor because it does go up and down," said Lisa Brandie, the manager of aquatic programs and leadership at the City of London.
"We'll find some of our toys that have somehow found their way under there. So we get those back once a year."
The aquatics centre offers recreational swims, lane swims, aquafit classes, swim lessons and aquatic leadership programs. It's also home to high school swim programs.
The pool cleaning and maintenance is expected to wrap up after next week. Regular scheduling resumes on Monday, Sept. 14.
LISTEN: Draining London's largest pool for its annual cleaning and maintenance:
