A thousand feet of vinyl will be covering a street near you. But don’t worry, you don’t have to drive on it. It’s for sliding, set up by a traveling event called Slide the City.
You might remember the Slip ‘n Slide from your own childhood. It’s basically a 16-foot-long yellow, plastic sheet. You spray water onto it from the garden hose to make it slippery, then you just need a running start.
So take that concept, multiply it by about 60 and you have the slide created by JSC Events, a Salt Lake City-based startup. The three-lane slide takes up an entire street. And it needs a little more than a garden hose.
Emily Clifford-Sanchez is with Slide the City and said the slide uses about 15,000 gallons of water in a day. But she said the trick is that they clean and reuse the same 15,000 gallons throughout an event.
"So there would never be a time when there would just be water pouring out," she said. "Because that would be completely irresponsible and a total waste."
This weekend the slide will roll out on Palisades Boulevard in Fountain Hills. It’ll be the first Slide the City event in Arizona. That’s in stark contrast to neighboring California, which has so far refused to hold Slide the City events due to concerns about water conservation.
But Fountain Hills Recreation Supervisor Rachael Goodwin said the 15,000 gallons of water aren’t just going down the drain at the end of the day.
"The water after the event will likely go through the sanitation district and be reused, most likely through our golf courses," Goodwin said.
Or even the 330-foot tall fountain for which the town gets its name.
Slide the City will be in Fountain Hills Saturday, and in downtown Phoenix on May 16.
