Creating an ice rink at B.C. Place

After having staged outdoor games a dozen times, the NHL is getting pretty good at installing rinks in football/baseball stadiums and making ice that’s good enough for a real game.

That task will be actually a little easier in Vancouver for the Heritage Classic because B.C. Place has the ability to keep its roof closed if rain threatens. The only challenge in Vancouver is a tight window to get in and out of the venue, so head ice-maker Mike Craig and his crew of 18 worked around the clock with two crews on 12-hour shifts.

Here’s how it’s done: Crew puts down three ¾-inch layers of plywood on the stadium floor to provide a solid subfloor 243 ice trays (28 inches wide by 30 feet long) are laid on the rink floor Piping to carry the 2,500 gallons of coolant is installed and the refrigerant is pumped in Coolant flows through a 53-foot-long mobile refrigeration truck, which has more power than the refrigeration plant at Rogers Arena The crew mists the sur- face with about 16,000 gallons of water, requiring hundreds of passes over several days, until it is about two inches thick Early on, about 300 gal- lons of water-soluble paint is applied to turn the sheet white; later the various lines and logos are painted on before the final layers are put on 16 Eye-on-the-Ice sen- sors are embedded to provide constant data about the condition of the ice Ice is kept at about -5 C.