Yilan County’s last concrete playground slide in Luodong Township’s (羅東) Chungshan Park (中山公園) is safe from demolition, for the moment, the Luodong Township Office said.
“The slide has been here for more than 20 years, and we have never received any complaints about safety. There are currently no plans to remove the slide,” the office said.
“Any decision about what to do with the slide would require taking public opinion into account and consultations with experts,” it added.
Photo: Chu Tze-wei, Taipei Times
In the past few months, the Taipei City Government declared old-fashioned concrete slides — previously often seen in Taiwan’s parks and playgrounds — as unsafe for children, and began removing them from the city, with the slides in the Wanhua District’s (萬華) Youth Park (青年公園) and Daan Forest Park (大安森林公園) in the Daan District (大安) among the first to be removed.
The policy proved controversial. In Taipei, residents, parents’ associations and even children left hand-written notes on the slides, urging the municipal government to spare them.
One common sentiment is that the concrete slides have been part of communities for decades, and children who played on them have now grown up to be parents.
Once a favorite for park builders, the slides have been fading away across the nation, as cheaper and more convenient plastic playgrounds take their place.
The Chungshan Park concrete slide is the last of its kind in Yilan, surrounded by colorful plastic upstarts, even as news of Taipei’s slides stoked local anxieties.
“There were no plastic playgrounds before. Concrete slides were the favorites of many children who have now grown into adults; we grew up playing on them,” one local resident said. “Nobody ever got hurt using them, and they are durable.”
“If [the Chungshan park’s concrete] slide is to be removed, a great deal of people would be sad to part with it,” the unnamed resident said.
The Luodong Township Office said it does not know exactly how long the concrete slide has been in Chungshan Park, but it is more than 20 years old. The township has already taken precautions to enhance the slide’s safety by installing padding at the end of the slide.
However, if mainstream public opinion and safety experts agree that the concrete slide is unsafe, it will be removed from Chungshan Park, the office said.
All playground elements in planned parks and kindergartens are made of plastic, the office said.
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