ATHOL, MA -  The wait for the re-opening of the Lake Park playground is over, and children who had eagerly awaited the event now have a safer, healthier place to play that replaces the old toxic playground.

Jacob Brissette, 8, is the son of Heather Brissette, who served on the playground committee, which kept fundraising efforts going and kept the project at the forefront. He said he thinks the new playground is a lot better.

He should know. He lives in the neighborhood and played on the old equipment, watched it come down, waited during cleanup and stared at an empty lot for two years, eagerly awaiting the re-opening.

Luckily for Jacob, the new equipment went up in only two days with the help of volunteers. He admits it was hard to wait, even for just two days.

“I like this a lot,” he said with a huge smile on his face while he played on the Mobius climber with a friend Friday. It was the first day the playground was open to the public after an inspection Thursday afternoon.

Read more about the opening here .

Read about what the people who ran this project were up against here .

Other fun tidbits from the article:

• The old equipment, built in 1987 from pressure-treated wood, had seen its day. It was torn down after to the discovery in fall 2005 of high levels of arsenic in the soil.
• A ninth-grader who did a science project discovered the high levels of the toxin.
• 300 tons of contaminated soil had to be removed.
• It took two years of fundraising and collecting private donations, added to money voted by the town, to complete the $200,000 project.
• They used chopped up tires for safety surfacing.
• There is the more traditional playground equipment, including plenty of slides and swings, and the not-so-traditional: a natural-looking rock climber; a Mobius climber, which looks like a giant strip of rippled metal ribbon erected sideways with strategically placed handholds running along it; a large play structure for kids age 5 to 12 with three-dimensional plastic climbing webs and wiggly, wobbly bridges, each step suspended independently from a metal arc overhead; and a similar structure sized down for preschoolers, but not lacking in creative apparatus.
•  The local Department of Public Works likes the new equipment because there are fewer areas for child predators or teens engaging in illicit activities to hide. Also, it is cleaner and requires less maintenance.