Inside The Arena Inside The Arena A Busy Crew Works Hard To Prepare Facility For Variety Of Events

The ice at the Spokane Veterans Memorial Arena is hockey ice, cold and fast. Frozen in thin layers and held at 16 degrees, it is perfect for the Spokane Chiefs, whose skates gouge and shave it.

Not so perfect for Scott Hamilton.

Figure skaters like the ice a half-inch thicker and six degrees warmer. When Stars on Ice were in Spokane, their representatives walked out on the ice and shot it.

“With an infrared gun, just like aiming at your head,” said Dave Gebhardt, building engineer whose job it is to worry about the ice.

The gun measured the surface temperature. If it was one degree off, the Stars might have skated out the door.

It was 22.7 degrees.

“We were excited,” Gebhardt said. “We couldn’t have gotten any closer.”

The ice is the foundation of more than a third of all Arena events: 36 Chiefs games, weekly amateur matches and skaters from Hamilton in January to Michelle Kwan and Brian Boitano in June.

For every event at the Arena a behind-the-scenes work force scrambles to ensure everyone - performers and spectators - come away happy. Skaters expect and need a near-perfect surface, and Arena workers are vigilant about the quality of the ice. Throwing trash on the ice is the fastest way for a fan to be ejected. Other threats include heat, chipping and dirt. A clump could end a career. Truckloads of dirt are out of the question. So when last month’s rodeo, or this week’s Motorsports Spectacular comes to the Arena, the ice must be removed and then remade afterward.

It is a laborious process that brings the Arena’s labor crew and engineers out in force.

“I’ve heard people say we flip a switch and the ice appears and disappears, or it slides in and slides back,” said operations manager Wendell Smith.

There is no switch.

The melting begins at 2:30 a.m. on a Sunday. In the boiler room, Gebhardt sends frigid salt water to a heat exchanger and out through 11 miles of pipe to warm the concrete slab under the ice to 50 degrees. It is an automated state-of-the art system that one engineer likens to a Swiss watch. Seats are automatically retracted in anticipation. The elephant door rises.

But in the end, it comes down to this:

A city worker picks up a blade and begins hacking. A loader with a custom curled blade screams in, breaking the ice into plate-sized chunks. Next a 1954 Terratrac, looking like a mini-tank with a giant squeegee in front, churns through. A Ford pickup rams the rest out the giant back doors.

It takes 12 men and women working all night to remove the hockey dashers (the partial walls around the rink), the high plexiglass panels and the ice. It will take at least twice that long to replace the ice.

Days later, when both the rodeo and its dirt are gone, engineer Rodney Bishop will use an industrial hose to spray water on the floor about 1/8-inch deep.

Once a layer is frozen, Smith’s crew uses a garden hose to apply paint. Without 300 gallons of white paint, the ice at the Arena would be as gray as the concrete beneath it.

Sign painter Ruben Marcilla then uses giant plywood stencils, concrete marks and strings to paint hockey rink lines and logos. Water will again be applied and frozen in thin layers, until the engineer is satisfied.

The air in the building is cold, about 60 degrees, to help the ice along. Standing on the ice, the cold comes through shoes, through socks, up ankles to a shiver. The guys in golf shirts don’t notice.

Together, Smith, Charlie Edwards, Bob Davis and Pat Eymont have spent more than 100 years making and breaking ice in the Spokane Coliseum and now, at the Arena, often at 3 a.m.

“We tell people we roll it up and hide it,” Gebhardt said. “And they believe us.”

Certain principles apply to the crew here.

First, you have to like purple. To work at the Arena is to don purple golf shirts, pulled from purple lockers, next to purple cupboards, down purple stairwells. Management calls it dusty plum and the crew says it beats the old gas station attendant look. But Cougar fans can spot it a block away. “There is no school connection,” maintains general manager Kevin Twohig.

Second: You almost never see the show. The labor crew goes home before events begin and returns when they’re over. Event crews are so busy as to miss it. Managers can’t enjoy an event in the Arena. To relax, they have to go to Seattle.

Third, there are nosebleed seats at the Arena. Although the elevation just rises from 25 to 60 feet, the Arena first-aid station routinely treats people who say they got a nosebleed sitting in the upper level. Nurses put ice behind the neck and pinch the top of the nose to stop the bleeding, then return the spectator to their seat. Two nosebleeds in a night and you’ll get your seat moved. “We have nosebleed reports for every event,” says Twohig.

On a big night at the Arena, 400 people go to work. The city of Spokane manages the operations, and six subcontractors handle tickets, food, novelties, cleanup, security and parking. But if the plumbing backs up they call one person: “The engineer,” says Gebhardt. “The 911 for the physical property.”

The three engineers who staff the building vow to spend this year learning its secrets. They travel with new equipment manuals, blueprints and architects who drop by from ALSC, the firm that designed the building.

They’ve wrestled with heating and air conditioning units that for weeks froze everyone sitting in Section 218. They’ve repaired a leaky pipe behind a concrete wall. Twice the plumbing in the busiest men’s room backed up during events.

“People thought the plumbing ghosts came over from the Coliseum,” Gebhardt said. Actually, pipes left in the drain line during construction caused the backup.

But you can’t blame people for feeling spooked. When engineers went home from the old Coliseum, the ice would immediately begin to melt. The roof leaked. Some mornings, fog appeared at the end of the rink. Sometimes, puddles.

The crew would take a jackhammer, go through the concrete to find a leak, fix it and then patch the ice.

“When we went to work it wasn’t something was broken today, it was what was broken today,” said engineer Bishop.

When an area power outage darkened the Arena recently, Gebhardt headed straight for the back-up generator.

Wham. He walked into a concrete corner and took a 2-inch scrape off his nose just as the generator, on a 10-second delay, blinked everything back on.

“In the old building, you instantly reacted, you flew to where the problem was,” he said.

For the engineers, the new place takes less hard labor and more head labor, Bishop says.

For the labor crew, who also work all the events at the Opera House, Convention Center and Albi Stadium, there never seems to be enough time. They must rapidly convert the Arena to hockey, to basketball, to a convention site and back again in order to meet the schedule of 140 events.

But tales from the Coliseum remain vivid. “The last two years of running the Coliseum were pretty miserable,” Smith said. “This is our reward.”

It is a $62 million reward. More building than many in Spokane can believe, people say. More to clean, too.

In the old days, the labor crew cleaned the building between events with hoses and mops. Charlie Edwards kept a locker full of putty knives just for scraping off petrified nacho cheese.

The new Arena is cleaned nightly. Before midnight, the Arena crew’s Myron Guffey comes through with up to 28 custodians from American Building Maintenance. Moving in small formations across rows of seats, they dump full beers into buckets, pick up cups, paper scraps, bits of pretzels.

Then come hand-held blowers, blasting tiny pieces of popcorn and peanuts out of nooks and crannies of retractable aluminum seats to a pile at the bottom.

The new system has drawbacks. The building has to be ventilated so exhaust fumes are dispensed during cleaning. And crews must run up and down twice as many stairs. They walk an estimated 10 miles a night and “nobody needs a Stairmaster,” Guffey says.

The efforts to keep the building clean are obvious. Jeff MacPherson and a crew of six spend every event mopping floors, maintaining bathrooms and removing “human spills” (vomit). And fans seem to do their part. “You’d be surprised how much does get dropped into trash cans,” Smith says. And you’d be surprised by what doesn’t.

A private suite rented for the evening was so trashed that an Arena crew won’t let a reporter near it. The women’s restroom is always messier than the men’s, the rodeo is not as trash intensive as the hockey game and the hockey game isn’t nearly as bad as the circus. Yes, the circus.

“Kids,” the custodians say.

They have seen the enemy and it is 4-year-old with a snow cone.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 5 Color photos