Water parks are usually a fun way to beat the heat but anytime you’re dealing with large amounts of water that people are going to share, there are going to be hygiene issues to consider, and if one Reddit thread is to be believed (and I really hope it’s not) Volcano Bay at Universal Orlando Resort has been home to some fairly disgusting moments from time to time.
The thread on Reddit started with a post about how, it’s simply common courtesy, not not to have your kid pee in front of the wave pool. It’s one thing to know that there are probably kids relieving themselves in the water of Volcano Bay as a theoretical concept. It’s quite another to apparently see it actually happening. I’m not arguing that when they need to go, they need to go, but I would argue there is a place for that.
However, this initial post opened the floodgates of apparently terrible behavior, which theme parks are used to seeing to be honest, including one person reportedly using a water feature to wash out a diaper bag. Which, unsurprisingly, caused a massive shut down of the area so the water could be treated.
It used to be that the only reasons we’d see water parks shut down was because it was too cold, as happened to Disney World’s Typhoon Lagoon, and the beginning of the year. Cold does happen in Florida from time to time. While this is not the worst water park tragedy at a Florida theme park in recent years, it is pretty terrible to have to read about.
On the one hand, it would be easy to say “Hey, this is Reddit, and not everything you see there is true.” We probably would want to say that, because we don’t want to believe any of this. At the same time, we’ve probably all seen our share of bad behavior at water parks and public pools, and while these might be extreme examples of that, they’re not necessarily extreme enough to believe they’re impossible.
And of course, while it’s easy to blame kids for some of these incidents, it should be pointed out that parents are really the clueless ones in these situations. They’re the ones washing out diaper bags and allowing their kids to do some of this stuff. A lot of other incidents that people bring up in the thread are parents treating their kids pretty terribly. By the end you feel bad about the kids.
Hopefully you will have some fun at a water park this summer and you won’t need to deal with this sort of behavior from kids or their parents. But maybe check out the other people in the pool first.
