Ok, so maybe the subtitle of this article is slightly clickbait-y. I’m sure you’ll forgive that though in light of the amazingly niche Aquazoid billboard reference. It even features a tower being destroyed! This is peak Water Country USA comedy guys!

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Anyway, there may not be any CERTAIN COSMIC DOOM! involved here, but we have INCREDIBLE DESTRUCTION! and AMAZING ADVENTURES! covered! Let’s get into it.

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As we have covered on social media and briefly mentioned in a frontpage photo update back in September, something is wrong with one of Water Country USA’s largest slides, Aquazoid. No official announcements regarding its status were ever made by Busch Gardens, but Aquazoid remained closed for much of the Summer 2019 season. At one point, it was even pulled from WCUSA’s website entirely.

What was going on? Well, according to the rumors we heard at the time, the closure was due to some sort of major structural concern with the side’s tall wooden tower structure. Our photos back in September showed construction flags and even caution tape on the tower which definitely lent some credibility to that rumor.

Then a couple of weeks ago, we got our first confirmation that something substantive was about to happen. Friend of BGWFans and ParkFans forum member, Adam, found a utility marking request for the purpose of “demo[ing] stairs and sidewalk” as well as “digging for footings and foundations.”

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This is where that “AMAZING ADVENTURES!” part comes in.

We chartered a flight recently to take photos of the construction progress on Pantheon. If you haven’t seen our article with nearly 50 exclusive aerial Pantheon construction photos, make sure you check it out! It was a huge deal for us.

Anyway, while we were up there we took a quick detour over to Water Country USA to see if anything interesting was going on there yet. Well, as you can probably deduce from the existence of this article, the answer is yes. Something very interesting was going on.

This is where we get to the “INCREDIBLE DESTRUCTION!“

I think my actual quote over the plane’s headsets as the slide came into view was “Holy shit, Aquazoid’s tower is just gone?!” Obviously, from the evidence Adam found, we anticipated that some major work was going to happen. We didn’t really expect the whole tower already to be flattened though!

So yeah, here is that INCREDIBLE DESTRUCTION (you can’t make me stop!) from our brief Water Country USA fly-around.

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A close look (at the second picture especially) shows that the entire tower is legitimately gone and the construction site still seems to be active.

Though no official word has been released about what is happening here, we think it’s safe to say that Aquazoid will survive this. The demolition seems to be much more thoughtful and targeted than, say, what KDFans saw when covering the demolition of Tornado.

If we had to guess, we would suspect that a new (almost certainly metal) tower will have Aquazoid ready to reopen to guests sometime this spring. In our perfect world, Busch Gardens Williamsburg would invest a little extra to get some of Aquazoid’s long-neglected theming and special effects back into good working order as well ahead of its 2020 relaunch!

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We’ll continue to keep tabs on Aquazoid as we’re able in the coming months. Since Water Country USA news is normally a bit more minor for us though, there’s a good chance that small updates won’t make it to the BGWFans.com frontpage.

To stay up to date, we suggest keeping tabs on the Aquazoid thread on ParkFans.net and following BGWFans on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.