Long Beach Paves the Way for Swim Trials

They are paving paradise and putting up a swimming pool in a parking lot.

Well, make that two pools in the parking lot by Long Beach Arena. And the paving -- the pouring of the concrete foundation -- started Monday afternoon, a few strokes away from the ocean itself.

The transformation from parking lot into a potential world-record playground for swim star Michael Phelps got underway last week in downtown Long Beach. A construction team of two crews pulled long hours, a week that included one day of bona fide Olympic reality: Athens-type heat of 104 degrees in Long Beach on May 4.

Ultimately, the result will be two temporary, above-ground 50-meter pools -- a competition pool and a warmup pool. The focal point of the summer will be the U.S. Olympic swim trials, July 7-14, which could draw 10,000 people a session.

Serving as a test event for the pools will be the Janet Evans Invitational from June 10-13, featuring the likes of Australian star Ian Thorpe and his teammates as well as a host of top Americans, including Lenny Krayzelburg, winner of three gold medals at the 2000 Sydney Olympics.

Additionally, there will be women’s and men’s water polo tournaments. After the final water polo event, the pools will be disassembled and sent to their new homes in Yucaipa and Berkeley Heights, N.J. Each pool was sold for $450,000, Long Beach organizing committee officials said, partly recouping the original cost of the pools, which was about $2.4 million.

For now, rapid assembly is the main mission.

If the usual construction of a pool is like a drawn-out, 1,500-meter freestyle -- typically, it takes six to eight months to put together a 50-meter pool -- then this venture is like a 50-meter race, splash and dash.

The date circled on the calendar?

“Probably the first day of June, we will fill the pool,” Beth White, chief operating officer of the 2004 Aquatics Grand Prix, said last week. “That will give us two or three days to clear the water and make sure things are running smoothly, giving us five days in front of the JEI, the Janet Evans [meet].

“Right now, on the master schedule, the pool fill is on June 1. Nine firetrucks. It’ll take them three hours.”

Doug Roberts of DWR Construction was confident the tight timetable would be met.

“Oh yeah, but we will put a priority on the competition pool,” he said last week in an interview at the work site. “It absolutely must be done. So hence you see us working very heavily on it right now. We’ll probably finish up at 9 tonight.”

The designer and builder, Myrtha Pools, a commercial division of A&T; Europe SPA, is the biggest in its field, building about 250 commercial pools a year, said Rich Foster, chairman of the organizing committee. It has built swimming pools in more than 60 countries, from structures in Iceland to indoor and outdoor pools at the National Sports complex in Hanoi.

“It’s really not new technology,” Foster said. “In ‘96, in Atlanta, they had a Myrtha pool. In the last two world championships, they had Myrtha pools.... It’s a tested technology. We’re not taking any risks here.”

The parking-lot pool experience is uncharted territory for the company, a Myrtha official told The Times in an interview last month.

Foster joked that they are fond of saying the process is like building an Erector set. Make that an Erector set with stainless-steel pieces from Italy.

“You and I could put this pool together,” he said, smiling. “ ... We’d have to have supervision.”

That would come in the form of Roberts. He said the project would unfold in stages, starting with the pouring of the concrete foundation.

“What happens is if you pour it all at once, the concrete contracts,” Roberts said. “It will actually stretch a bar of steel and weaken it. So you do it in two pours, and it contracts a little bit and you pour in between it.”

After the second pour, the crew will start assembling panels and putting in different mechanical systems. The pool deck -- which will be made with environmentally friendly decking -- is nine feet off the ground. Bleachers from the recently completed Long Beach Grand Prix have been moved over to the pool site area.

Who would have thought there would be the same views from a swim meet and an auto race?

“If you are in an arena, you could be anyplace in the world,” Foster said. “You could say it is in Las Vegas or Rio de Janeiro. They’re going to have this view of the sailboats, the ocean, Queen Mary. It’s going to be a great PR event for the city. You can’t buy that kind of PR.”