The Karen Magnussen wave pool is closed until further notice after a light fixture fell from the ceiling onto the pool deck, narrowly missing a pool user and the head lifeguard.
The incident happened late Wednesday morning.
“A light fixture in the pool chamber fell onto the deck. There were no injuries. The pool is closed and our maintenance and engineering department is analyzing reasons and planning the remedial work,” said Cathy Matheson, North Vancouver Recreation Commission spokeswoman.
While there were no injuries, it was a close call, according to pool user David Sinclair.
“I was just coming out of the steam room and heard the smash and turned around saw the elderly gentleman and a couple of the people standing in shock and trying to get out of the way from the glass on the deck,” Sinclair said. “For years, I’ve been looking at these big, heavy glass lights and thought ‘Why do they have glass over a swimming pool? They could be plastic shells.”
There were workers on the pool roof at the time the fixture plummeted. They were stripping off old leaky roof material and replacing it with a new metal covering, but that isn’t likely the cause of the incident, Matheson said.
“The manager of engineering for the North Van rec commission went up on the roof because that was his first consideration, whether the two issues were related, and his response was there is absolutely no connection,” Matheson said.
“Some mild vibration may have created that issue to occur but it may have occurred eventually anyway. We can’t make a connection between the reroofing and the incident.”
The building has had a number of repairs and refurbishments made over the last years.
