NORTH PROVIDENCE – Years ago, the town took aggressive measures to remove geese and installed new fountains in the Wenscott Reservoir, leading to less bacteria in the water and fewer beach closures at Notte Park. Some of those closures of old would last much of the summer.
The positive trend has generally held, though each summer still brings some temporary closures.
The most recent closure of the water to swimming, starting June 29, has been a tough one, happening during the hottest and most popular beach weeks of the year.
Mayor Charles Lombardi said the water was tested again Tuesday morning, July 14, and he’s hoping to hear back that the facility is safe again for swimming so it can reopen this Thursday, July 16.
The beach and playground remain open for use, but swimming is off-limits until further notice by the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management.
The mayor said the town still faces this issue a couple of times per year, but overall the situation has improved. He said this extended closure has been unfortunate.
The town also traditionally struggled to keep enough lifeguards employed during the summer months, in part because of the closures, but Lombardi said that they’re no longer having that problem.
The main reason for that positive change has been that Orca Aquatics now partners on management of the town pool behind the library, and part of the deal with the town requires them to provide lifeguards for the pool, said the mayor. In the past, officials sometimes had to make a choice of where to send a lifeguard to keep one of the two facilities open.
Lombardi said the full-time director of the North Providence Pool and Fitness Center, Dylon Willes, has had some great new ideas to encourage more people to use the facility, and since it reopened last April, the town has seen a “significant number of new memberships.”
Orca also pays the town for use of the pool, and the association with the town leads to residents being able to benefit from quite a number of programs, said the mayor. He said the hope is still that the pool would one day pay for itself similar to how Camp Meehan/Notte Park does.
