The Springfield News-Leader reported on Monday that Jordan Valley Ice Park closed due to the failure of the facility’s temporary ice plant. The ice at the two-sheet arena complex, located about 215 miles southwest of St. Louis, will be down for at least the next three weeks.
RinkAtlas doesn’t like to criticize an arena complex without fairly deep analysis of the building and its operations. But consider what we learned about Jordan Valley Ice Park from reading one article about it:
- The permanent ice plant at this facility was installed in 2001 when the arena was new. It was taken off-line about a year ago for upgrades and maintenance.
- At that time, a temporary ice plant was installed behind the building.
- That temporary ice plant is the one that failed.
Jordan Valley Ice Park is not the only facility in North America running long-term on a temporary ice plant. For instance, Loucks Ice Center at Lawrenceville School in Lawrenceville, NJ has been running on a temporary ice plant for several years.
We get concerned when it appears that a year-round facility installs a temporary ice plant without a concrete plan to re-install permanent ice-making equipment within a finite time period. The reason for this concern is that it’s tough to do contingency planning around the outage of a temporary ice plant, because loss of a temporary ice plant sometimes results in extended downtime.
This is the case with Jordan Valley. The silver lining is that this problem is happening during the pandemic, when most rinks operations are already significantly constrained.
RinkAtlas Arena Directory Changes
- Jordan Valley Ice Park, renamed facility. For a while it was referred to as Mediacom Ice Park, but it has apparently reverted to its original name. Added “Mediacom Ice Park” as a previous name. Added references to two 200-by-85-foot surfaces that opened January 1, 2001 (January 1 is the date we choose when we know that an arena opened in a specific year, but we do not know the specific date). Changed the URL for the arena complex’s website to https://www.parkboard.org/icepark.