Content warning: This post discusses a catastrophic fire and loss of life.
I took this picture exactly one year ago:
That plume of black smoke is 5km away and is the result of this
catching fire during construction:
A few weeks later I passed by what remained of it while biking to the other big disc golf course in my city. The deconstruction work was already underway.
Oceana, a big and ambitious water park, was scheduled to open the following summer. Instead, a part of one of the slides caught fire when the construction workers were doing some sort of heat-based method of joining plastic pipes together. The fire spread to the other slides, turning them into big chimneys, accumulating all the flammable gases emitted by the heated plastic in the big central tower. Eventually, the gases ignited, rupturing the main building and spreading the fire further. One person lost his life.
What was going to be a new fun thing for Gothenburg to be proud of instead ended up on the huge pile of stuff of Things Not Going Well Around Here.
They’ve since torn down the superstructure, preserving all the parts of the building not damaged by the fire. Progress is underway to rebuild Oceana once more.
I intended to make some sort of post about it on cohost shortly after taking the final picture above, but I never got around to it. Reading in the news about it being the one-year-day of it happening made me want to revisit it. Kind of a bummer post to make, especially after such a long posting break but there you go. I’m not sure how much reach this news story got outside of Sweden, so maybe this is the first time you hear about this.
Take care out there.
rykarn