When a new water park at Morgan’s Wonderland in San Antonio, Texas, opens later this year, it will be accessible for wheelchair users, thanks to specially made waterproof manual wheelchairs.
Morgan’s Wonderland worked with Convaid and Ki Mobility to design caregiver-propelled and rigid-framed, self-propelled manual chairs to be used at Morgan’s Inspiration Island, the new water park. A local company provided the manual wheelchairs’ upholstery in colors coded according to wheelchair size.
Changing rooms at the water park will be available for guests to transfer from their everyday power or manual wheelchairs to waterproof ones built specially to make a splash.
Inspiration Island will feature six water-themed areas, including Shipwreck Island, Castaway Bay and Calypso Cove. A river boat ride will take passengers through a jungle setting. The park will feature rain trees, water cannons, falls, geysers and other attractions, and is designed to be accessible for people of all abilities.
The water park joins Morgan’s Wonderland, a fully accessible theme park and playground built by the Gordon Hartman Family Foundation. Hartman’s daughter, Morgan, lives with physical and cognitive challenges and is the inspiration behind the parks.
In addition to the caregiver-propelled and self-propelled manual chairs on loan, Morgan’s Wonderland collaborated with the University of Pittsburgh’s Human Engineering Research Laboratories (HERL) and the U.S. Department of Veterans
Affairs to create and introduce a wheelchair that is propelled by compressed air.
The waterproof PneuChair has no batteries and weighs about 80 lbs. It has about a three-mile range per charge, but recharges in just 10 minutes. Stealth Products produced the initial inventory of 10 PneuChairs for Inspiration Island.
