Carisa Lee

Af­ter over five years of con­struc­tion, the Five Is­lands Wa­ter and Amuse­ment Park of­fi­cial­ly turned on its pumps and opened its doors Fri­day.

It’s a project that cost Chair­man of Fouraime En­ter­pris­es John Aboud and his part­ners $500 mil­lion and a month­ly rental fee to the Ch­aguara­mas De­vel­op­ment Au­thor­i­ty (CDA) of $417,000.

“We un­der­es­ti­mat­ed the se­ri­ous­ness and grav­i­ty of the con­struc­tion, most of it is un­der­ground,” Aboud said.

“Hap­pi­ly it’s now over,” he added.

Aboud said they are in talks with the CDA for a new rental fee now that the fa­cil­i­ty is opened.

But some of that mon­ey went back in­to the econ­o­my. Aboud said through­out the al­most six years on­ly lo­cal em­ploy­ees were hired and now that the wa­ter park is op­er­a­tional 400 lo­cal peo­ple will be per­ma­nent­ly hired.

“One of the suc­cess­es of the project is that you are mak­ing a very fun­da­men­tal con­tri­bu­tion to the coun­try,” he said.

In his speech, the busi­ness­man said the dream for the wa­ter park start­ed in 2014 when the CDA put out a re­quest for in­for­ma­tion or a re­quest for a pro­pos­al that was ac­cept­ed in April of that year.

“This wa­ter park and our pur­pose here this morn­ing is a com­bi­na­tion of blood, sweat, and tears,” he said.

Wear­ing an ‘I love wa­ter parks hat’, Aboud said the Five Is­lands de­sign done by an ar­chi­tec­tur­al and struc­tur­al firm from Texas can be com­pared to any wa­ter park in the world.

It’s for that rea­son and its lo­ca­tion he sees the mul­ti­mil­lion-dol­lar park as a tourist at­trac­tion for the Caribbean and even the world.

“This is a tourism project,” he said.

“There is noth­ing like this north and south of us ex­cept for The Ba­hamas,” he con­tin­ued.

Aboud said he plans to cre­ate a pack­age for re­gion­al and in­ter­na­tion­al tourists us­ing the wa­ter park and the ho­tel for­mal­ly known as the Carl­ton Sa­van­nah now called The BRIX. The ho­tel is sched­uled to open in March of next year.

“When our cus­tomers come the ex­pe­ri­ence must start from our carpark and hope­ful af­ter dis­cus­sion with the CDA the ex­pe­ri­ence must start when they pass Al­coa,” he said.

Yes­ter­day’s open­ing was orig­i­nal­ly sched­uled for March but be­cause of COVID-19 re­stric­tions, the date was pushed back. How­ev­er, in those three months the fa­cil­i­ty was ad­just­ed to lim­it the spread of the virus.

Hand­wash­ing and san­i­tiz­ing sta­tions and ther­mal cam­eras cost­ing $110,000 each were in­stalled.

Ac­cord­ing to Aboud, the wa­ter has three times the amount of chlo­rine to kill COVID-19 with an ul­tra­vi­o­let wa­ter sys­tem that kills bac­te­ria and a high­ly sen­si­tive fil­tra­tion sys­tem.

The park was built on a 25 acres prop­er­ty.

The amuse­ment sec­tion was opened in 2017 but closed be­cause of COVID-19. The ar­cade will re­main closed.

The park will open dur­ing the Ju­ly-Au­gust school va­ca­tion pe­ri­od and on week­ends and hol­i­days. Every at­trac­tion at the park was lo­cal­ly named.