Taking a dip in a potential future pool might also help make New York City greener.
The founders of the + Pool project Tuesday showed off their plans to create a state-of-the-art outdoor Olympic size pool in a Big Apple river that would also help clean up the surrounding water.
The plus-shaped pool, which is slated to arrive in 2016 at an undetermined location in NYC, will contain special filters in its walls that decontaminate the river water in certain areas and produce clean H2O for swimmers.
“We thought, instead of cleaning the entire river, why not clean pieces?” +Pool co-founder Archie Coates said at a news conference in Greenpoint yesterday.
Coates and his team came up with the idea in 2010 and through two Kickstarter campaigns they have raised more than $270,000 of the estimated $15 million needed to fund the pool. The pool will clean an average 500,000 gallons a day; it will be situated off a coast tethered to a river wall and it will be accessible by a bridge.
The money helped create atesting facility off Pier 40 on Hudson River Park.
The 35-foot by 8-foot-long testing facility won’t be open to the public for swimming during the testing period, which will last a few months on the West Side and may move to the East River, but the project’s engineers said it will give them a sense of how to properly launch and operate the final product.
Dong-Ping Wong, a +Pool co-founder, said they partnered with Google to create an dashboard app that tracks the progress of the testing.
“It gives hard data for everyone for what we are doing,” he said.
