By ROBERT LINNEHAN | The Voorhees Sun
Daniel Miller, 15, and his buddies were all set to head down to the playground on Main Street last week when they found a strange surprise.
When they arrived at the location there was no more playground equipment, just piles of bulldozed wood.
What happened to the playground, Miller thought to himself, as he looked at the piles of wood lying around the ground. The wooden playground had been across from the Mansion’s parking lot since the early 90s, and now it was gone.
Miller can blame the disappearance on jittery insurance carriers. Township Administrator Larry Spellman said their insurance company does not insure wooden playgrounds any longer, he said, because of the risk of injuries and splinters.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, part of the United States Department of Labor, declared that these types of wooden playgrounds present some physical dangers and health threats, Spellman said.
“It’s a very popular playground, it’s something we didn’t want to do but we really had no choice. It’s too bad it had to come down, it was a great playground, there aren’t many around, and there aren’t many that will appear again,” Spellman said. “The insurance companies won’t insure them anymore. It’s a shame really.”
The playground had experienced some damage through the years, he said.
Some of the support posts that held the playground up were starting to rot and deteriorate, he said, and it would most likely not have been able to be repaired.
The committee, though, will likely authorize the use of $50,000 to expand and build new playground equipment at the currently playground at Connolly Park. It won’t be another wooden playground, he said, but will include some of the elements that made the playground at Main Street so popular.
The donor wall — which featured a number of local residents who gave money to the township when the original playground was being built — will be preserved and installed at the new playground at Connolly Park, he said.
The bricks located at the old playground with donor names will also be transplanted to the new playground.
“It was a real community bonding type of thing. People bought the bricks for it, and it was a good playground. I was out there last week, and there was a lot of wear and tear. Many of the supports were rotting underneath,” he said. “Because of the existing insurance laws, playgrounds built from now on will mostly be all vanilla.”
If the committee appropriates the funds, $35,000 will be used for new equipment and $15,000 will be used for installation costs. Hopefully, if all goes well, construction on the new playground will begin by the summer, Spellman said.
The township hopes to expand the new playground in future years, Spellman said, until it has something equivalent to playground at Main Street.
“We’ll augment the playground there now and do it for the next few years and hopefully have something that is as popular as what we had,” he said. “We’ll be rebuilding the wall and hopefully it will be as nice as what we did have.”
