Playtime at the Strathcona Beach Park playground in Kelowna, B.C., is on a time-out after a recent vandalism incident.
“We come here a lot and we normally like to meet a friend here,” said a seven-year-old Kelowna resident named Kaelyn.
The city has temporarily shut down the playground, located across the back of Kelowna General Hospital.
“It’s just very disappointing that even our playgrounds aren’t safe,” said Angie Dixon, Kaelyn’s mom.
The playground is an inclusive one and fully accessible for children with mobility issues.
Perhaps more troubling is that the vandalism occurred while the city was working to make it safer by installing a fence around the play structures to keep children, particularly neurodivergent ones, secure.
“It’s a solution that came out of our stakeholder engagement with the user groups,” said Amy Nyhof, project technician at the City of Kelowna.
“It’s more our neurodivergent users, which appreciate a sense of enclosure and provides a bit of support and safety to some of our park users.”
Nyhof said the vandalism involved one of the steel fence posts that had been installed for the enclosure.
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“It just appears as though some group maybe came in on the weekend and started to really pull heavily, forcefully, hard enough to bend it and pulled the anchors out of the concrete and damaged the concrete curb,” Nyhof said.
The city had been keeping the playground open in the evenings and weekends during the fence instillation but has now closed it for the duration of work being done.
“Certainly disappointing that one small act of vandalism can create such an impact to our community,” Nyhof said.
At the Starbright Children’s Development Centre, which supports children with special needs, the vandalism hits deep.
“It was actually shocking to know that people would have indeed done damage to a space that is going to mean so much to families,” said Rhonda Nelson, Starbright’s executive director. “Because there aren’t many like this.”
This marks the third case of vandalism to involve a pubic space or property in just days.
A week ago, three young dogwood trees were snapped at the Rise Memorial garden honouring the victims of the 2021 crane collapse. Earlier this week, vandals caused more than $15,000 in damage to agriculture water meters in Southeast Kelowna.
“No matter how hard we try , we get two steps forward, one step back from vandalism,” Dixon said. “I used to be proud to be from Kelowna and now not so much anymore.”
If all goes according to plan, the city hopes to reopen the playground at Strathcona park on May 6.
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