The Centennial Fountain is having to be repaired, mainly because trash from the canal has clogged up the filters. I think we need to consider draining the canal once a year to clean it. Keeping the canal clean is extremely important to the overall appearance of Bricktown.

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"Repairs to begin on canal fountain


By John Sutter
The Oklahoman

Dirt, trash and algae have infested the Bricktown Canal, and a major fountain that runs off its water is having maintenance problems.

The Centennial Plaza Fountain in front of the Harkins Bricktown 16 will soon be put on a separate filtering system, city officials said.

Tuesday, members of the Oklahoma City Council approved up to $55,000 in MAPS sales tax money for the new fountain water source.

Oklahoma Centennial Commemoration Inc. will match the MAPS money.

The new system will work like a pool, with water circulating from the fountain to a filter and back.

Tim Johnson, president of the firm that engineered the fountain, said the original design was not flawed but was based on water quality at the time.

Since then, businesses have moved in and more people use the canal, he said.

That combined with debris from construction projects have made the water too dirty to squeeze through the fountain's fine filtering system.

Other fountains run off the canal water, but none use pop jets like the centennial fountain.

Pop jets have smaller valves than most fountains and shoot water into the air in time with music, Johnson said.

"You can let a two-inch diameter chunk go through the main pumps, whereas the fountain you can't let anything more than a quarter of an inch go through," he said.

Larger pumps also grind debris so it can get through, he said.

The canal hasn't been drained and cleaned in two or three years, which is on schedule, said Greg Crotchett, who supervises canal maintenance for the city.

The last time the water was drained, sections of the canal bottom had 6 inches to a foot of sludge, he said.

"It's safe, but it's dirty," Crotchett said.

Johnson said more frequent cleaning would help, but the fountain would still need a new water source because of algae.

Algae is also clogging the finer filters. Fountain jets aerate water as they shoot it into the air. The increased levels of oxygen in the water make it better suited for algae.

"We're our own worst enemy in that case," Johnson said.

The Centennial Plaza Fountain was built last year as part of canal developments funded by MAPS and the centennial commission.

A private company maintains the centennial fountain, but the city takes care of several others, all of which pull in canal water. Crotchett said those fountains, particularly the one at Bass Pro Shop, get clogged when there's an algae bloom. The nozzles on other fountains are larger and therefore harder to clog than those on the centennial fountain, he said. "