Wichita’s troubled water plant could be epic aquarium, snorkeling park | Opinion
The new Wichita water treatment plant is over budget, behind schedule, and doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do.
No surprise there.
From the city’s initial “I know a guy” approach to bidding the project to design flaws, construction errors and overpriced unnecessary decorations, there have been enough news stories written about the water plant to fill a fairly good-sized book — maybe a series.
So today, I’m not going to write about what went wrong. I’m going to write about how we can get out of this mess we’re in by being innovative, forward-looking, entrepreneurial and all the other buzzwords that Wichita uses to describe itself.
While the new $574 million water plant is not functional as a water plant, it would make an awesome aquarium and aquatic park — a one-of-a-kind tourist attraction of the sort that Wichita has craved ever since Joyland closed.
Hear me out.
When I look at the aerial views of the water plant, I see six huge open-air water tanks. Each of these could be repurposed to recreate a specific marine environment.
And unlike an ordinary aquarium, where you just gawk at fish through glass windows, this would be an interactive experience where you would actually snorkel or scuba dive amongst the aquatic creatures.
The big trend in museums and science centers these days is called “immersive experience,” which mostly consists of having outdoor scenes or famous paintings projected on the walls around you, creating a virtual reality (seriously, people pay good money for this).
What could be more immersive than, well, being immersed? Why go with virtual reality when you can have real reality?
The vision here is that each dive tank could replicate a marine environment from somewhere on the planet that has marine environments.
Imagine being able to dive the Cayman Islands, or the Hawaiian coast, or Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, all in one day, right here in the heartland of North America.
Once word got out, people would flock here from all over the Midwest, and Kansas would finally have the world-class tourist trap attraction our local leaders have dreamed of and promised for years.
This would be bigger that the WaterWalk, Wild West World and the Baseball Village all put together.
And it wouldn’t even be that hard.
We’d need water, and the treatment plant is already plumbed for that.
Since it’s an ocean experience, we’d need plenty of salt, but we can get all we could ever use just up the road in Hutchinson.
We’d need fish — oodles of fish. The treatment plant is right across the street from the Sedgwick County Zoo, so maybe they could help out with that.
We’d need artificial reefs. Between the aircraft industry and Wichita State University, somebody’s got to have a 3D printer that could run those out.
We’d need water heaters — lots and lots of water heaters. Fortunately, City Hall’s head cheerleader, Lonny the Plumber, can advise.
Originally, I thought maybe one of the habitats could replicate the waters off Greenland (or was that Iceland? I keep getting those two mixed up).
But then I realized we probably should keep our habitats to more-or-less tropical waters. Our track record with large-scale water chilling is pretty marginal (see Wichita Ice Center for reference).
As with any project of this magnitude, the key to success is getting the right crew to see it through. And I have just the people in mind.
We’re definitely going to need that guy from the Riverfront Legacy Master Plan team who sketched up the idea of gutting Century II down to the structural girders and turning it into the world’s biggest set of monkey bars.
We could also use an assist from Penumbra International, the guys who proposed the alternative to the riverfront plan, which included a convention center building shaped like a giant cat’s head, or whatever that was supposed to be.
Because that’s the kind of innovative, forward-looking, entrepreneurial thinking that has made Wichita what it is today.
