As kids in swimsuits rushed to and fro between waterslides, bounce houses and dunking booths, Orange Beach Police Chief Billy Wilkins couldn’t help but smile.

“There’s not a whole lot of places you can have something like this,” Wilkins said. “Orange Beach is unique.”

Wilkins was wandering through the frivolity taking pictures at Thursday’s the annual Kid’s Night Out at the city’s Waterfront Park. It’s the seventh year thepolice department has put on the event for area children as kind of a last fling before school starts.

Besides the water slides and a huge water hose set up by the fire department, the kids and families were also treated to grilled hotdogs and hamburgers.

“Something the neighborhood can turn out for,” Wilkins said. “We try to coincide with the opening of school, something for the local kids so they can have fun.”

The idea for the event came out of the National Night Out “a unique crime/drug prevention event sponsored by the National Association of Town Watch (NATW),”according to the group’s website. This year’s national event was on Aug. 4.

“It was an offshoot of that,” Wilkins said. “Orange Beach is not really the type of place where you go marching in the streets to prove you are taking theneighborhood back.”

Wilkins says this event fits the Orange Beach community and it’s a way for the people interact with his department.

“Something the neighborhood can turn out for,” he said. “This is just something we like to do. The community likes it, the kids love it. It gives us a chance toget out and see the people. It’s a lot of fun.

“We really enjoy it, our guys enjoy it. The kids enjoy it.”

Volunteers are needed to help make the night a success.

“Lot of the local people step up, churches and the firefighters step up,” Wilkins said. “We do the cooking and the firefighters let us borrow their trailer.”

While the crowds are still coming, Wilkins says have gotten smaller in the past few years.

“We still have some large crowds,” he said. “Last year we got rained out. We had it again the next night. We held the slides over, but a lot of people didn’t

think we were going to be here the next night.

“We don’t have the larger crowds the last two or three years mainly because the school population’s down some.”