After Fort Rapids Waterpark fire, prospective owner says next steps may be ‘out of the box’

COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) — The prospective owner of the abandoned Fort Rapids Waterpark worked for three years to get approval to purchase the East Side property, only for it to be struck by fire days later.

The real estate agent who helped to facilitate the sale said the next step is to tour the site and assess the damage firsthand.

Columbus real estate agent Dan Sheeran has been working three years with Drever Capital Management to get the go-ahead on the sale, and the company remains in contract for the property. Sheeran said he will visit the property on Wednesday and then Maxwell Drever will determine his plans going forward.

Watch: Drone shows damage to Fort Rapids

Drever’s plan had called to convert Fort Rapids into affordable workforce housing, and his group had already put $500,000 into the upkeep of the property. He’s still optimistic about the project, he said Tuesday.

“You can correct most things if you’ve got people that are not afraid to think out of the box,” Drever said. “In this case here, we’ve already talked to some folks about it locally that seemed interested in helping make it work.”

At 11:45 p.m. Sunday, Columbus fire crews responded to reports of burning in the area. They found a significant fire from the rooftop of a two-story hotel building that’s part of the site. Firefighters remained there into Monday afternoon.

Columbus declared Fort Rapids a public nuisance in 2021 after it was ordered to close in 2016 over a series of code violations. As it sat empty, in 2018, millions of gallons of water poured out of the Holiday Inn tower’s windows from a burst pipe on an upper floor.

Look: Photos of damage at Fort Rapids

In June, owner Jeff Oh Kern was ordered to pay $199,000 in contempt fines to the city and $1,000 in daily fines. When a warrant was issued for his arrest in August, his daily fines were increased to $2,000 and his bond was set at $2.5 million. He still owes contempt fines, but those can be paid out of the proceeds from the Fort Rapids sale, according to Klein’s office.

Kern has been subject to similar legal troubles elsewhere. He averted a Michigan, jury trial in a 2023 criminal case related to his failure to clean up the demolition site of a Holiday Inn he owned in Midland.