WISCONSIN RAPIDS, Wis.-
It’s almost crunch time for the city in its campaign to keep the stink out of a local rink. The Witter Field ice rink has a 2-year-old, $196,000 warming house, but it also has a not-so-savory reputation for its late-season odor.
Bill Mohr says visits to the rink often end back home at the washing machine–to clean his daughters’ winter clothes of the stink after their falls on the ice.
“Yeah, it’s bad,” Mohr said. “You ask just about anybody who goes out there and they will tell you. … It’s almost like a sewer.”
Dan Morzewski, relief supervisor with the city’s Park and Recreation Department, said the problem isn’t believed to be the ice but the dead grass beneath it.
In late January and February, sunshine heats the ground and causes an ooze of mud and grass that bubbles to the surface at soft spots in the ice, he said.
“We end up with what we call boils–areas where it boils up kind of like a volcano,” he said. “It smells in my opinion like manure.”
With this year’s mild winter, the city has only opened the rink two days, but a cold snap this week allowed for reflooding the rink to reopen it, probably Friday, for the rest of the season, he said.
If the weather cooperates, skaters should learn in coming weeks whether the city solved the problem this year by scraping away the grass before flooding the rink.
But even if it works, there will be more questions for the city, Morzewski said–like whether it will be cost-effective to go through the scraping operation and then have to replant grass each spring.
