The supply for a demand is taking shape atop a red clay hill on the edge of metropolitan Columbia.
When Ice Land USA — complete with a Zamboni and a rink that would suit the needs of a National Hockey League team — opens in January, it means South Carolina’s capital city will no longer be one of the largest communities in the country without a full-service public ice skating rink.
“Ice skating sports have been some of the fastest-growing participant sports in the country,” said David Bass, president and majority owner of Ice Land USA. “And this market has long lagged behind others of its size in terms of recreational variety.”
Besides being a great way for everyone to beat the heat, Bass said, Ice Land USA will appeal to the many Northerners who now call central South Carolina home but grew up in wintry climes.
And Bass turned to a company from one of the nation’s Snow Belt cities to build the new frozen palace — Icebuilders out of Syracuse, NY.
Perry M. Smith is the project manager responsible for pulling together the 41,000-sq.-ft. (3,809 sq m) building on a 7.5-acre (3 ha) tract off U.S. 176 near the Columbia suburb of Irmo. The project began last February with the clearing of the site and work on the building began in June.
Concrete Construction Co. of Columbia is the site contractor, and relied on Caterpillar equipment to do that job, including a motor grader, a pan, two bulldozers and an array of backhoes and compactors.
Other heavy equipment being used on the project includes a Lull from United Rentals, telescoping fork lifts, extendable fork trucks and crane service provided by Jones Erecting of Cayce.
Smith, the project manager, is a veteran ice rink builder. His company’s most recent project was in Vacaville, CA, where it built a double ice skating rink and an inline skating rink. Next up are rinks in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and Philadelphia.
The centerpiece of the $4-million Columbia project is the rink. A lot goes into, and under, the oval piece of ice that will serve as the heart of Ice Land USA.
Underneath the 200- by 85-ft. (61 by 26 m) oval (and just getting the oval true with almost no tolerance is a challenge) are several layers of sand and tubing for both heating and cooling.
Smith describes the process this way:
“You start with an underfloor heat grid, with 18-in. centers all the way across. That gets buried in 6 in. of sand and then gets leveled, plus or minus an eighth of an inch, the whole way across. This is to prevent frost from driving into the ground under the ice.
“On top of that, we’ll put two layers of 1.5-in. Styrofoam, then on top of that we’ll lay a slip sheet. Spacers will go on top of that and then we’ll put 3.5-in. centers of refrigerator tubing down. That’s about 10.5 miles of tubing across that floor.
“That gets covered with two inches of sand. The sand is then soaked until saturated as we begin pulling the temperature of the floor down to 16 degrees. That makes the surface sand as hard as concrete,” continued Smith.
“We then begin flooding the rink with a firehose that sprays out a fine mist, laying down about a sixteenth of an inch to a half-inch with each flooding. We end up with a quarter inch of ice that we then paint white.
“Then we add another quarter inch of water and put in all the circles, logos, penalty boxes, creases and anything else that needs to show through the ice,” Smith explained.
“We then will add another quarter inch of ice, leaving us with three-fourths of an inch of ice, which is the optimal thickness,” he said.
And, of course, each step of the way after the first layer of ice goes down, the Zamboni goes out. The distinctive ice grooming machine had been parked in Bass’ home driveway, but spent the holidays in a Columbia mall, helping to attract attention to Ice Land USA’s impending opening.
About $370,000 was invested in the rink’s cooling system, the heart of which is a large chiller unit from Carrier. (Another heart of the project is the 735 pairs of rental skates Ice Land USA has in stock ready to be laced on and put to use.)
The project has posed some other special challenges. For one thing, the humid climate of central South Carolina means that special attention had to be paid to keeping the air dry. “What happens when you get warm, wet air over a cold surface? You get fog,” Bass said. “The dasher boards also fog over.”
Addressing that problem required buying a $45,000 dehumidifier from Texas-based Munters. The arena then has to be insulated and sealed against outside air. Of course, the whole building will be air conditioned against South Carolina’s brutal summer heat, allowing for year-round comfort for users of its eight locker/party rooms, video arcade, concession stand, music booth and other amenities.
The site itself, which also will feature 170 parking spaces, presented an obstacle or two. For starters, the ground preparation included moving about half the dirt from one side of the site to the other, reshaping the hilltop it sits on and cutting down dramatically on the amount of soil that had to be taken away.
And Ice Land USA may be one of the few projects whose managers can say was delayed by rain during the drought conditions of the past year, including a record-breaking dry month of October.
“This red clay is unbelievable to work around,” said project manager Smith. “Trucks can get in and out easily when it’s dry, but just when we got rocking and rolling on the building, two tropical storms came through. That held us up. And then we’ve had small rains that did the same.”
The site prep work also unexpectedly called for dynamite when crews ran into shale rock where there was supposed to soon be ice rink foundation. “We recontoured the site plans to change some of the elevations to minimize the amount we had to blast,” Smith said. “But we still had to blast a pretty sizable chunk out of there.”
Despite the weather and other setbacks, the project is still considered on track for its January opening.
“The inherent hard thing on any project is setting the finishing date. It’s like asking the final score of the Super Bowl before the game is played,” Smith said. “The weather hurt us on this job. There are also shipping issues, fabrication problems, a lot of unforeseen things.”
With about five or six trades at work at any give time, there were usually about 50 people on the job as Ice Land USA was taking shape. One subcontractor Smith said he wanted to single out was the masonry crew.
“Voyles Masonry has done an outstanding job,” the project manager said. “They made sure everything was done right and in the right place to make way for the electrical and plumbing, and everything they did was high quality work. Daniel Voyles and his crew just did an outstanding job.”
The final product also should be an outstanding addition to the Columbia area, he said.
“This is going to be a nice arena for this area,” Smith said. “It’s a nice thing for this town. It’ll be good for youth hockey, and with the Inferno coming in, this will be a great facility to help support them.”
The Inferno is the name of a minor-league hockey team that will begin to play in Columbia in the fall of 2001, using the old arena at the University of South Carolina until a new arena is built nearby.
South Carolina already hosts East Coast Hockey League teams in Florence, Greenville and Charleston, and public rinks have begun appearing around the state as well, reflecting increased demand for a cool sport in a warm state.
“I really think this area can support another two or three sheets,” Smith said of the Columbia market.
Indeed, Ice Land USA was built in such a way to allow the addition of a second rink and 100 more parking spaces to the facility, which Bass said he is prepared to do if the market demands. CEG By Marc Rapport
CEG CORRESPONDENT
The supply for a demand is taking shape atop a red clay hill on the edge of metropolitan Columbia.
When Ice Land USA — complete with a Zamboni and a rink that would suit the needs of a National Hockey League team — opens in January, it means South Carolina’s capital city will no longer be one of the largest communities in the country without a full-service public ice skating rink.
“Ice skating sports have been some of the fastest-growing participant sports in the country,” said David Bass, president and majority owner of Ice Land USA. “And this market has long lagged behind others of its size in terms of recreational variety.”
Besides being a great way for everyone to beat the heat, Bass said, Ice Land USA will appeal to the many Northerners who now call central South Carolina home but grew up in wintry climes.
And Bass turned to a company from one of the nation’s Snow Belt cities to build the new frozen palace — Icebuilders out of Syracuse, NY.
Perry M. Smith is the project manager responsible for pulling together the 41,000-sq.-ft. (3,809 sq m) building on a 7.5-acre (3 ha) tract off U.S. 176 near the Columbia suburb of Irmo. The project began last February with the clearing of the site and work on the building began in June.
Concrete Construction Co. of Columbia is the site contractor, and relied on Caterpillar equipment to do that job, including a motor grader, a pan, two bulldozers and an array of backhoes and compactors.
Other heavy equipment being used on the project includes a Lull from United Rentals, telescoping fork lifts, extendable fork trucks and crane service provided by Jones Erecting of Cayce.
Smith, the project manager, is a veteran ice rink builder. His company’s most recent project was in Vacaville, CA, where it built a double ice skating rink and an inline skating rink. Next up are rinks in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and Philadelphia.
The centerpiece of the $4-million Columbia project is the rink. A lot goes into, and under, the oval piece of ice that will serve as the heart of Ice Land USA.
Underneath the 200- by 85-ft. (61 by 26 m) oval (and just getting the oval true with almost no tolerance is a challenge) are several layers of sand and tubing for both heating and cooling.
Smith describes the process this way:
“You start with an underfloor heat grid, with 18-in. centers all the way across. That gets buried in 6 in. of sand and then gets leveled, plus or minus an eighth of an inch, the whole way across. This is to prevent frost from driving into the ground under the ice.
“On top of that, we’ll put two layers of 1.5-in. Styrofoam, then on top of that we’ll lay a slip sheet. Spacers will go on top of that and then we’ll put 3.5-in. centers of refrigerator tubing down. That’s about 10.5 miles of tubing across that floor.
“That gets covered with two inches of sand. The sand is then soaked until saturated as we begin pulling the temperature of the floor down to 16 degrees. That makes the surface sand as hard as concrete,” continued Smith.
“We then begin flooding the rink with a firehose that sprays out a fine mist, laying down about a sixteenth of an inch to a half-inch with each flooding. We end up with a quarter inch of ice that we then paint white.
“Then we add another quarter inch of water and put in all the circles, logos, penalty boxes, creases and anything else that needs to show through the ice,” Smith explained.
“We then will add another quarter inch of ice, leaving us with three-fourths of an inch of ice, which is the optimal thickness,” he said.
And, of course, each step of the way after the first layer of ice goes down, the Zamboni goes out. The distinctive ice grooming machine had been parked in Bass’ home driveway, but spent the holidays in a Columbia mall, helping to attract attention to Ice Land USA’s impending opening.
About $370,000 was invested in the rink’s cooling system, the heart of which is a large chiller unit from Carrier. (Another heart of the project is the 735 pairs of rental skates Ice Land USA has in stock ready to be laced on and put to use.)
The project has posed some other special challenges. For one thing, the humid climate of central South Carolina means that special attention had to be paid to keeping the air dry. “What happens when you get warm, wet air over a cold surface? You get fog,” Bass said. “The dasher boards also fog over.”
Addressing that problem required buying a $45,000 dehumidifier from Texas-based Munters. The arena then has to be insulated and sealed against outside air. Of course, the whole building will be air conditioned against South Carolina’s brutal summer heat, allowing for year-round comfort for users of its eight locker/party rooms, video arcade, concession stand, music booth and other amenities.
The site itself, which also will feature 170 parking spaces, presented an obstacle or two. For starters, the ground preparation included moving about half the dirt from one side of the site to the other, reshaping the hilltop it sits on and cutting down dramatically on the amount of soil that had to be taken away.
And Ice Land USA may be one of the few projects whose managers can say was delayed by rain during the drought conditions of the past year, including a record-breaking dry month of October.
“This red clay is unbelievable to work around,” said project manager Smith. “Trucks can get in and out easily when it’s dry, but just when we got rocking and rolling on the building, two tropical storms came through. That held us up. And then we’ve had small rains that did the same.”
The site prep work also unexpectedly called for dynamite when crews ran into shale rock where there was supposed to soon be ice rink foundation. “We recontoured the site plans to change some of the elevations to minimize the amount we had to blast,” Smith said. “But we still had to blast a pretty sizable chunk out of there.”
Despite the weather and other setbacks, the project is still considered on track for its January opening.
“The inherent hard thing on any project is setting the finishing date. It’s like asking the final score of the Super Bowl before the game is played,” Smith said. “The weather hurt us on this job. There are also shipping issues, fabrication problems, a lot of unforeseen things.”
With about five or six trades at work at any give time, there were usually about 50 people on the job as Ice Land USA was taking shape. One subcontractor Smith said he wanted to single out was the masonry crew.
“Voyles Masonry has done an outstanding job,” the project manager said. “They made sure everything was done right and in the right place to make way for the electrical and plumbing, and everything they did was high quality work. Daniel Voyles and his crew just did an outstanding job.”
The final product also should be an outstanding addition to the Columbia area, he said.
“This is going to be a nice arena for this area,” Smith said. “It’s a nice thing for this town. It’ll be good for youth hockey, and with the Inferno coming in, this will be a great facility to help support them.”
The Inferno is the name of a minor-league hockey team that will begin to play in Columbia in the fall of 2001, using the old arena at the University of South Carolina until a new arena is built nearby.
South Carolina already hosts East Coast Hockey League teams in Florence, Greenville and Charleston, and public rinks have begun appearing around the state as well, reflecting increased demand for a cool sport in a warm state.
“I really think this area can support another two or three sheets,” Smith said of the Columbia market.
Indeed, Ice Land USA was built in such a way to allow the addition of a second rink and 100 more parking spaces to the facility, which Bass said he is prepared to do if the market demands.
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