|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Filling a Need It wasn’t quite the same as selling ice to Eskimos, but Jack Harrington’s notion of building a water park in
Hawaii seemed almost as absurd. A dentist with a busy practice in Lake Tahoe, Nev., Harrington ’70, DDS ’74, remembers how he first got the idea. On a vacation in Maui, he noticed that his kids weren’t exactly sprinting to the beach. In fact, they spent most of their time schussing down the water slides in the hotel pool.
“The beach was almost completely empty,” he recalls. “Everyone was at the pool.” An entrepreneurial little voice in Harrington’s head whispered: “Why not build a water park in Hawaii?”
Harrington heeded the voice. He secured a team of experts and began searching for a location. Initially, Maui seemed the obvious best bet – until they scouted Oahu’s “second city” of Kapolei. “Kapolei is ideal,” he says. “The weather is perfect for year-round operation, the site is well located, and there’s lots of room for expansion.”
So the daring dentist co-founded Waters of Kapolei LLC to develop Hawaiian Waters Adventure Park, now a 25-acre, $14 million water-theme park and home to the state’s first-ever wave pool and numerous other waterslides and attractions. Many visitors report that the diamond-pattern of wave production reminds them of the surf at Windward Oahu’s Bellows Beach, a popular novice surfer haunt. The pool can create five wave patterns that run as high as four feet. Waves, incidentally, are produced by air rushing into a water chamber. The air displaces the water, pushing a wave out an opening into the pool. When the air pressure is released, water surges back into the chamber for another wave.
While his co-founders provided this technical know-how, Harrington brought his vision to the project. “I knew exactly what I wanted – a first-class operation,” he says. “It had to be family-oriented, fun and safe. This park was not going to be an eyesore. No concrete structures with exposed infra-structure.” No indeed. The park is built into the cliffs of Kapolei and dressed in lush landscape – waterfalls, 1,000 palm trees and monkey pods (a common island shade tree). Hawaii-based architectural and design consultants were selected to ensure an accurate depiction of these elements.
Shades of Disney? Perhaps. While an undergraduate at USC, Harrington worked as a ride operator in Disneyland’s Tomorrowland. The experience set the standard against which he compares other attractions – and the one he used for Hawaiian Waters Adventure Park.
Yet Harrington acknowledges that Hawaiian Waters is no longer his project. “The park now has a heartbeat of its own,” he says. “It belongs to the people of the area.”
|
|
|
