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Jennifer McMillan knows all about ice. As head ice technician at the St.
BEAVERING AWAY
Codie McLachlan

Jennifer McMillan knows all about ice.

As head ice technician at the St. Albert Curling Club, she's got 15 years of ice-making under her belt and was one of the few people trusted to maintain the ice at Edmonton's recent Roar of the Rings curling tournament. "I was a rink rat," she says, like her mother before her and the job gave her plenty of time to do her homework.

Steve Schlese over in the city's parks department also knows a thing or two about ice. "I've worked in the arena for about 13 years," he says, "and have been in charge of the outdoor rinks for the last three or four." He also came in sixth place during the 2005 Zamboni Olympics at Rexall Place.

The Gazette figured they'd be just the people to answer a burning question: how do you make good ice?

Rink ice

Ice technology has changed considerably over the years, Schlese says. They used a tractor-pulled ice-scraper in the Ducky Dome back in the day, he recalls, and flooded the area using barrels of water. Nowadays, the Zamboni scrapes and sprays the ice in a single pass.

The first step to smooth ice is hot water, Schlese says. Cold water freezes too quickly on contact with the cooled slabs of an ice rink, he explains. "You'll get little honeycomb bumps all over the ice." Hot water takes longer to freeze, which gives the water more time to flatten out.

Schlese usually aims for about an inch of ice indoors — any thicker, and it acts as insulation and reduces the effectiveness of the cooling plant. He aims for about three inches on outdoor rinks, flooding the snowpack until it turns grey and air-free. "You don't want a broad spray," he adds, and you don't want to hit the sideboards too much.

Once the ice is established, it's a matter of scraping and re-flooding it whenever it's too cut up from skates. "On ice maintenance day, you can take 10 to 12 loads of snow off," he says. One Zamboni operator can resurface a rink in just six minutes.

Curling ice

It takes a lot longer to prepare a curling rink, McMillan says — up to two weeks. "And that's if no car comes through the side of the building," she jokes, referring to a bizarre crash at the rink in September.

Curling ice needs to be perfectly level or it will interfere with the players' precision throws. McMillan and her crew flood each lane by hand about once a month, carefully tracking the way the water freezes to ensure a flat surface.

Unlike the outdoor rinks, the lanes in the curling club are made from water purified by reverse osmosis. Ice cubes have white centres because they freeze from the outside in, McMillan explains, pushing the microbes, iron atoms and other impurities into the middle. Water in a curling rink freezes from the bottom up, so ordinary water would make ice with a lot of gunk on top. "When you freeze reverse osmosis water, it's completely clean," which makes for clean ice. It's also clear ice, she notes, so they have to paint it white.

Smooth ice makes for rotten curling, McMillan notes — the flat ice rubs against the flat stones, causing too much friction and slowing them down. "It's like a shuffleboard game," she says. "If you don't have that wax on it, it's hard to get down to the end."

Ice technicians use a device called a beavertail (a water bag with a beaver-tail-shaped sprinkler) to spray drops of water on the surface, pebbling it. The pebbles reduce the surface contact between the ice and stone, causing it to move faster — too fast, actually, for game conditions. They use a push-razor called the nipper to level out the pebbles and get the right speed out of the ice.

Drafts, warm hands and knees, dirty shoes and carpet fluff are constant threats to the ice surface, according to McMillan. They use a tiny ice scraper to fix the ice between matches and melt it entirely every month by using a lane-wide, propane-fired hotplate.

It's a lot of work, but this is what the 800-odd curlers at the club need to get their game on. "If it wasn't done this way, you'd get a lot of complaints."

All Schlese says he'd like in return is a little patience for his crews when they work. "We're not doing it to make you mad. We're doing it to make the ice safe."


Kevin Ma

About the Author: Kevin Ma

Kevin Ma joined the St. Albert Gazette in 2006. He writes about Sturgeon County, education, the environment, agriculture, science and aboriginal affairs. He also contributes features, photographs and video.
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