FREEZE AND THANK YOU
Pan Am Games and sizzling summer weather are heating up business for local icemakers,
The hottest weekend of the summer was also one of the busiest at the Iceman. On a muggy Sunday afternoon, when the temperature hit the low 30s, the phones were buzzing every few minutes at the Adelaide St. W. office of the ice distributor. Restaurants, bars, private parties and, especially, Pan Am Games venues all needed to cool off.
On days as hot as last weekend, the Iceman moves about 60 tons — 54,431 kg — of ice per day, according to head of finance Jake Silva.
His father, John, co-owns the business. He started it in the early 1980s out of the back of his father’s store, Silva’s Variety, on Queen and Markham Sts. Now, they produce 10 palettes of ice a day, which weigh almost two tonnes each. They buy the rest of their ice bags from Arctic Glacier, the largest producer in Canada.
They send 5 to10 skids of ice a day to Pan Am venues, Silva said.
“In the spring we try to prepare the best we can. Depending on the weather, it can get really busy. We have to be ready for anything.”
On the dispatch desk, 30-year-old Michael Aguilar spent most of the time glued to the phone, giving directions to the Iceman’s fleet of 10 delivery trucks.
André Gadbois, a finance student at U of T, sat a few feet away taking customers’ orders.
“All I hear now is Cherry Street, Cherry Street, Cherry Street,” he said, referring to the Pan Am athletes village in the West Don Lands.
Before he was hired this summer, he didn’t know there was such a demand for ice. Nor was he prepared for all the puns he would have to endure. “People always say it must be a pretty chill place to work, as if I’ve never heard that one before.”
Some of his friends have got into the habit of quoting some of Mr. Freeze’s lines from Batman & Robin. (“All right, everyone chill!” the movie villain played by Arnold Schwarzenegger says in one scene, brandishing his giant freeze gun.)
Even under pressure, Gadbois kept his cool on the phone. While he fielded calls, driver Evan Wheatly, 25, prepared for his ninth and last delivery of the day, an order of 540 kilograms of ice for Pan Am Equestrian Park in Caledon.
Wheatly had to make the delivery by 9:30 p.m. He zipped along a mostly traffic-free highway and reached his destination with an hour to spare.
After the security checkpoint, he drove the heavy-duty refrigerated truck through a maze of fenced-in roads and pulled up outside the caterers’ tent.
He opened the back and pushed a dolly holding a ton of bagged ice to the edge of the truck’s loading gate. The cargo teetered precariously on the platform. Then its plastic wrapping burst under its own weight and half the bags spilled onto the ground. “Oh s---!” the volunteer said. There was no harm done, though, except to a couple of bags that had split open. Wheatly and a Pan Am volunteer transferred the rest into an ice machine.
It all seemed like a lot of effort for 45 bags of frozen water. Then again, you might not think so the next time you order a whisky on the rocks.