The cool science behind Montgomery Whitewater's engineering feats

Montgomery is getting what Scott Shipley learned from his “experiment” in Charlotte, N.C.

Montgomery Whitewater, he said, is bigger, better designed and will have more attractions and activities.

He and his team learned “how to do this in a better way,” he said

Shipley, a former kayak Olympian, designed the U.S. National Whitewater Center in Charlotte, which opened in 2006.

The Georgia Tech graduate owns S2O Design & Engineering, based in Colorado. The company designs whitewater venues all over the world, but Shipley said the Montgomery project will be the most modern so far.

The biggest lesson that Shipley, 53, learned from Charlotte is that only one in 10 visitors get wet. The park needed more attractions.

“We needed something for those people to do,” he said.

The recreation and entertainment venue in Montgomery will have a walking trail, a restaurant, wall climbing and a new amphitheater, all right next door to Maxwell Air Force Base.

There are plans to add infrastructure for activities like paddleboarding and kayaking in the Alabama River, mountain biking, ziplining, surfing and more.

One of the aspects of the Montgomery project that Shipley says stands out is the addition of devices called RapidBlocs. The system he patented uses metal rails in the floor of the concrete channels to attach movable obstacle blocks and create changeable water conditions.

The bright blue blocks are visible under the rushing, sparkling blue water.

There are also ways to cut off the water channels when they aren’t in use.

“It saves a lot of money that way,” said Megan McKenzie, who was instrumental in getting the park project going. Sediment traps are also visible on the bottom of the swirling water.

They are placed where Shipley knew they would be most beneficial. He knows because he built a scaled replica of the park — warehouse sized — in the Czech Republic, McKenzie said. Shipley knew what he was getting into.

It took two weeks to fill the real park with 12 million gallons of water from the city’s system. Shipley said the park only needs to be filled every two years because of the state-of-the-art filtration and treatment system that reuses the same water.

Visitors will always have “cool, fresh, clean water,” Shipley said.

The Montgomery project will use five of the largest submersible pumps in the world, capable of filling a swimming pool in 18 seconds.

The 120-acre site between Maxwell Air Force Base and Interstate 65 has two pump-powered concrete channels that widen and narrow to create different features.

Shipley said one channel will be a professional Olympic standard route and the other for “families to explore whitewater for the first time.”

“We want to be able to bring international competitors here and have that Olympic standard course,” Shipley said previously, “but we also want to make the hurdle to getting your church groups, and your school groups, and your family and friends out on that whitewater.”

When the park has its grand opening July 7-9, Shipley said the water channels will be ready for kayakers and rafters, as well as the amphitheater, restaurant and conference center.

All that lends itself to creating a whitewater and outdoor hub in an area not necessarily known for that kind of recreation or mountain-type activities.

“It’s like bringing Mohammad to the mountain,” said Shipley, a Seattle native.

Shipley hopes the park will really take off being close to the downtown core of Alabama’s capital, I-65 and 85 and Maxwell Air Force Base.

He envisions companies locating here and visitors spending more time in the capital as they travel along the state’s main corridors.

McKenzie said the park is meant to help create a better quality of life in Montgomery for what it will draw to the area.

Shipley, who competed in three Olympics as a kayaker, never got a medal.

“Turns out those are kind of hard to win,” he said jokingly. But the three-time World Cup winner says all the hard work put into his new project is going to be golden.

“There’s going to be a dramatic change to Montgomery.”

Holly Sutton is a freelance reporter for the Montgomery Advertiser.

This article originally appeared on Montgomery Advertiser: Cool science behind Montgomery Whitewater's engineering feats