Recent visitors to Carmel’s Inlow Park may have noticed something big missing.
Carmel Clay Parks & Recreation recently removed one of the park’s three wooden playground pods after a routine inspection found structural concerns.
“We inspect those routinely with our certified playground safety inspector,” said Michael Allen, Carmel Clay Parks and Recreation park maintenance director. “It required us to take a long, hard look and decide if it was worth spending the money now to fix this. Knowing we already had it in the pipeline for replacement made it an easy decision to just go ahead and mitigate the safety issue and start saving that money for a new replacement.”
The remaining two structures will continue to be monitored for safety. They were installed in 2001 and 2002.
“I think it has served the community well,” Allen said. “We still have the other two structures in place to continue to serve that community need to have a play feature there until we can ultimately get the new stuff out there.”
CCPR was already planning to replace the original structure in 2018.
“We had already been in discussion with designers on what the new playground could look like,” Allen said. “It was something we had been thinking about for a while.”
CCPR hopes to install the new playground a bit further away from the trees to give parents a better view of their children. It is still expected to have a tree house feel.
“It will have some new climbing-type features, possibly some roller slides. The final design hasn’t been officially confirmed,” Allen said. “We still want to keep that three-pod-type structure that it currently has.
Construction on the new playground is expected to begin late spring 2018.
