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On the morning of February 6, the NHL’s 53-foot mobile refrigerated truck pulled into Carter-Finley Stadium in Raleigh, NC and crawled through concrete tunnels before parking on the concourse overlooking the field. Derek King and his crew paused for a moment and looked at their screen. They had been planning and waiting for years to turn this venue into an ice rink to bring an outdoor NHL hockey game to another unexpected market – and now they had 12 days to pull it off.
“It’s just nice to be able to come into town and go to work,” said King, the league’s senior director of facility operations and hockey operations, who has helped develop more than two dozen outdoor games for the NHL and historic hockey Baseball fields inside has brought colossal football stadiums – even to a resort on the shore of a lake. Here came another challenge: building an ice rink at a college football stadium in Raleigh. On the newly designed website The Carolina Hurricanes will host the Washington Capitals on Saturday night.
Achieving this required an extensive effort of around 200 round-the-clock workers and a staggering array of resources: including 20,000 gallons of water and 3,000 gallons of glycol coolant, which produced a 200-foot sheet of two inches of ice.
The Washington Capitals take on the Carolina Hurricanes in an outdoor hockey game on February 18 in Raleigh, NC. (Video: NHL)
The rink was built despite meteorological challenges posed by Raleigh’s climate – temperatures this week were in the high 70s – but its completion marks the end of a three-year journey that has seen the project cut short because of the coronavirus pandemic 2021 has been postponed.
“This is a 24/7 operation right through to the game,” said NHL Events Producer Steve Mayer. “This ice crew that we have is the best in the business. You know things I’ll never know. It’s amazing how they can create ice in all conditions.”
It’s not the first time King and his crew have built an ice rink in a warmer climate — outdoor games have been held in California, Texas and Tennessee — but the weather dictated when they could work. The sun was her enemy. For almost the last two weeks they have waited until nightfall to start their work and flood the field. Before they could even get to that point, the field had to be covered with armored decks and a stage deck made of 243 aluminum ice trays.
Carter-Finley has only one access point to the field, King said, and instead of blocking it with his refrigerated truck, he chose to keep it open as a work area and elevate the truck to the shed above the field.
His crews then had to build scaffolding and lay flexible piping to the field. Once these were in place, a booster pump sent the refrigerant through the pipes to the field for freezing to begin. For seven nights, two teams of seven specialists – all with specific skills ranging from mechanics to plumbing to plumbing – worked hour-long shifts to flood the surface and create the ice.
The refrigeration unit is the nerve center for the operation. It is accompanied by two compressors and 300 tons of cold; The unit is used to pump the coolant and keep the ice temperature at 22 degrees. King said the crew can cool or heat the plate using sensors to monitor the temperature.
“We’re really not going to fight Mother Nature. It will dictate what we do during this build,” King said.
King and his team learned something new with every build. They built ice rinks that withstood all the elements – heat in Los Angeles, snow in Ann Arbor, Michigan, sun in Lake Tahoe, Nev Wild and forced the ice crew to build a thicker ice sheet.
“It’s remarkable,” said Matt Irwin, a defensive tackle for the Capitals, who has played in two warmer-weather outdoor games in Los Angeles and Dallas. “I can’t even tell you what’s in it. I just see them laying wood across the field – and next thing you know you have a full hockey rink.
The plan calls for the crew to flood enough for up to two inches of ice; The Hurricanes typically play on a 1.5 inch sheet in their home PNC arena. “We’re going to run a little fatter just to be on the safe side…it gives us a much more stable blade,” King said, and the most rewarding part is watching the crews end up laying lines and logos on the ice paint week.
The work continues after the game is over, the teams depart and the sold-out crowd head home. Unable to melt the ice, the crew freezes it to an even colder temperature. Then it is broken into pieces and hauled away on dump trucks.
“It’s precise. It’s a science,” Mayer said. “They’re the ones who have to come through for this game to happen.”