Magic Mountain to Add a Water Park : Leisure: Hurricane Harbor will cover 14 acres next to existing park. It will open by early next summer.

Six Flags Magic Mountain, which forged its reputation with a dizzying array of roller coasters, announced plans Thursday to open an adjacent water park by early next summer.

The new 14-acre park, to be called Six Flags Hurricane Harbor, will feature water slides, lagoons, restaurants and shops in a jungle-like setting. It will carry a separate admission price and, Six Flags officials hope, align the 23-year-old theme park with the newest industry trend: the two-day attraction.

“It offers something else to do, to keep people longer,” said Harrison Price, an industry consultant. “A water park is a logical addition” because Magic Mountain subjects visitors to a very “active” experience, he said, “and it gets hot as hell up there.”

The announcement did not say how much the new park will cost, and Six Flags spokesmen would say only that it will be in the multimillion-dollar range.

Hurricane Harbor could bring in as much as $45 million a year and provide 250 seasonal jobs in an area that was hit hard by January’s earthquake, they said.

Ironically, the earthquake served as a catalyst for the project. Hurricane Harbor had been on the drawing board for almost 10 years and seemed likely to remain there in the wake of serious quake damage to the Santa Clarita Valley.

Although the park itself suffered relatively little damage, its customer lifeline--Interstate 5--was severed. However, the freeway’s timely repair paved the way for what park officials say will be record attendance this summer. Six Flags concluded that if the park could do that well in a year when it faced such a big problem, it would do even better in most other years, executives said.

“We were very impressed with how quickly the state acted,” said Bob Pittman, chairman of Six Flags Entertainment, which operates theme parks in six other cities, including Atlanta, Chicago and Dallas. “We also saw that this area has gone through rapid growth in the last five years. There are new hotels, new businesses. We felt the time was right.”

Hurricane Harbor will be built on the now mostly empty northwest corner of Magic Mountain’s present grounds. When completed, the entire complex will be renamed Six Flags California.

According to Pittman, Magic Mountain already brings $200 million into Southern California from outside the area each year.

Tourism officials, shaken by the recent spate of riots, fires and temblors, were quick to hail the park’s expansion as a vote of confidence.

Gary Sherwin of the Los Angeles Convention & Visitors Bureau said, “The real significance . . . is that, despite a lot of bad news here, there is a major entertainment company that sees the long-term growth potential in the marketplace.”