When temperatures rise during the summer months, water parks are a popular way to cool off.
Amid deepening drought, park owners say they're recycling their water to conserve as much as possible.
The Ravine Water Park in Paso Robles uses roughly half a million gallons of water to fill the five pools.
“All of our pool water is recycled—filtered, cleaned, U.V. lights, and put back in," Brett Butterfield, an owner of Ravine Water Park, told KSBY.
The water filtration system in the kiddy pool turns over every forty five minutes, he told us. For the larger pool, the cycle lasts about three hours.
Butterflield says that the water slides at Ravine Water Park use between 1,500 and 3,000 gallons a minute.
“[The water] has to be reused, and all [the water] will be filtered," he said. "Ultimately we do have some backwash water at the end, the water that is ultimately dirty. [...] We use that for dust control in our parking lots."
Park owners say water is only used when the park is open, which is about three months out of the year.
“The drought hasn't really affected us," Butterfield said. "They have gone to asking us to landscape on certain days. If that doesn't affect us at all, we just have a lot of lawn that's mostly all gone now. Everything's on drip. So that's not a problem for us."
In June 2021, the park counted about 2,000-2,500 visitors each day.
The park is open for the next two weekends, and will be open daily starting June 11th. The Mustang Water Park near Lopez Lake opens this weekend.
