KAMLOOPS — The Canada Games Pool has been in use for nearly 25 years. Built for the 1993 Canada Summer Games, the city says it’s in need of major renovations.
Facilities manager Jeff Putnam notes one of the city’s priority during upgrades is to improve energy efficiency.
“A lot of people don’t realize that the Canada Games pool is such a large body of water and needed to be heated. This building produces 10% of the entire corporate greenhouse gas emissions for the whole city. It’s a very energy-intensive facility,” said Putnam.
“We’re going to look at ways that we can recover and improve the energy efficiency. One way is, in the far corner of the building, a lot of hot air is being vented straight into the atmosphere. We’re looking at ways maybe we can recapture that heat and put it back in to heat the pool water.”
The city has hired an architect that will help the city through the renos, which will be done in two phases and cost up to $7 million dollars.
“The first phase we’re going to reconstruct the roof and the building envelope,” he says. “It’s a very humid environment here, so we want to make sure the building is performing as efficiently as possible. We have $3 million in the budget right now. We expected phase one to come in around $3-5 million.”
Putnam says each phase will take a couple years.
“Phase one, the basic wall and roof repairs, and perhaps solar and that type of thing, would be investigated and designed in 2018 with construction to happen in 2019.”
Putnam adds the city is going to work to minimize any impact to pool users while renovations are happening.
