The summer of 2007 has been over for some time, and now the swimming season at the Ringallee outdoor pool operated by Stadtwerke Gießen AG (SWG) is coming to an end. Saturday, 8 September 2007 is the last day of swimming. The Ringallee outdoor pool will be open again from 9 am to 8 pm. From Sunday, 9 September 2007, the gates of the outdoor pool will be closed. Instead, the Ringallee indoor pool will be open longer on Sundays, i.e. from 8 am to 6 pm. The two unheated outdoor pools in Kleinlinden and Lützellinden have been closed since Friday 31 August 2007.
Poor season
"The 2007 season was practically a complete washout," says Reinhard Paul, SWG board member and head of the swimming pool department. "The problem was that it was never really consistently warm. Only when there are several hot days in a row do people think about cooling off in the outdoor pool. And such phases were simply in short supply this summer. Compared to the super summer of 2006, visitor numbers fell accordingly by around 44 %. From May to August 2007, we counted 81,625 visitors to our outdoor pools. To this must be added the figures for September, which are not yet available. But they don't make up for the poor result."
This makes the 2007 season one of the worst in recent years. By way of comparison: in the summer of 2006, SWG was still able to enjoy 146,488 visitors to the outdoor pools, while in the summer of 2005 there were 135,648 visitors.
We can only hope that the summer of 2008 will be a real outdoor pool summer again.