Park Awash With Rain : Skateboard Ranch Opening Canceled

DEL MAR —  If it’s not one thing, it’s another.

The Del Mar Skateboard Ranch opened up for business Friday after three months of forced closure because of liability insurance problems. But the heavens opened up, too, and the grand opening was a wipeout.

By late afternoon, Manager Heidi Herzog reported, the concrete skateboard bowls had been pumped dry of water from earlier rains and were ready for traffic. Then the rains came again.

Herzog said the park will open just as soon as it can be bailed out again. It will be a hard wait for the hundreds of skateboarders who had to go “cold turkey” when the park--the only public skateboard facility this side of Los Angeles--closed in August.

“The phone keeps ringing off the hook,” Herzog said, with calls from frustrated skateboarders inquiring when they can get back into action. Herzog was just getting used to handing out good news when Friday’s downpour put the skate park back on hold.

The center attracts about 5,000 skateboarders a year, and is the site of several national and regional competitions. It closed abruptly Aug. 30 when the operators were told that liability insurance had been canceled. Six weeks of searching failed to find another carrier willing to insure the park at a cost the owners could afford, even though the park has not had a liability claim in its seven years’ existence.

Then the Boy Scouts of America came to the rescue and agreed to include the Del Mar Skate Park in its Explorer Scout program, as special interest (skateboarding, of course) Explorer Troop 741. The scouts’ umbrella liability insurance now protects the skate park against injury claims--but not against rainstorms.