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The San Mateo County Parks Department is delaying the long-awaited opening of the renovated Flood Park playground in Menlo Park because the metal slide has gotten dangerously hot this summer, it announced Oct. 7.
The department said it is monitoring playground equipment temperatures and investigating ways to shield parts of the playground from direct sunlight. Officials hope to be able to open the playground by November thanks to cooler fall weather and the changing angle of the sun.
County Parks spokesperson Jeneane Crawford told The Almanac that the slide reached over 130 degrees during peak hours. However, the temperature largely depends on the angle of the sun and can be safe to use on otherwise hot days, she said.
The San Mateo County Board of Supervisors approved a $4.1 million contract to build the playground in May 2025. While construction was originally estimated to take nine months, the opening was delayed in June because safety reviews identified a need for modifications.
The new play area includes a climbing tower, zip lines, slides, spinners and swings, along with informal play space and a separate area for children ages 2 to 5.
Crawford said that the department hopes newly planted trees may provide shade for the play structure.
Crawford said that once the slide opens, parents and kids should use the five-second rule: If someone can comfortably hold their hand against the slide for five seconds, it is safe to use.
“It’s really a wonderful playground, and we can’t wait to see kids enjoying it,” she added.
The playground is the second phase of a broader renovation of the 21-acre, county-owned Flood Park, located at 215 Bay Road in Menlo Park. In 2014, the county determined that the park, which opened in 1937, needed a comprehensive overhaul. The project was later dubbed “Reimagine Flood Park.”
The first phase, estimated to cost $11.5 million, opened in 2025. It included new basketball, sand volleyball, tennis and pickleball courts, a bike pump track and renovated picnic areas.
Then-Parks Director Nicholas Calderon described the Flood Park renovation as the largest known and most comprehensive renovation of a county park.
The first phase was funded by Measure K, a half-cent county sales tax.
Serious pats on the back here but:
$4.1 million, nine months of construction, and multiple safety reviews, and the county’s big discovery is that a metal slide gets hot in the sun. Nobody on the project had ever touched something metal in like pretty much all months of the year in California. Somebody alert the physics department, because apparently metal absorbing radiation from a star, is something new in this world.
The official fix is now to wait until November, when the sun will graciously change its angle all by itself. No redesign, no engineering, just the Earth’s axial tilt doing the county’s job for free. We could have skipped the contractor and hired an astronomer.
Then there’s the 5-second rule. A 130-degree surface, and the safety plan is to have parents hold their kids’ hands against it and count. That’s not a safety protocol, that’s a cooking technique.
And the trees, of course. Newly planted trees will provide shade, right around the time today’s toddlers qualify for Medicare. Meanwhile “we can’t wait to see kids enjoying it” is a bold thing to say about a slide you can’t let kids touch.
Does anyone else think everyone that touched, reviewed or approved this project should be fired and / or recalled? $4.1M – the price of a mansion, including the land, for a play structure? Is this thing made of $100 bills? And now the design doesn’t even allow this thing to be used?!
The incompetence is breathtaking.
In China they built a hospital in a week during the start of the pandemic. San Mateo takes 18 months to build a slide that is unsafe to use and pays the equivalent of 15 Ferraris for the privilege.
Now THAT is insane.