Many outdoor rinks set to reopen in the Southeast this week

With a return to freezing temperatures, many outdoor rinks in the Southeast are being reopened this week. 

Within a few, short days in late January, all public outdoor rinks were closed due to unseasonably warm weather that lasted for weeks, however, we now have below zero temperatures in the forecast for the foreseeable future.  

Russ Dyck, Head of Steinbach Parks and Recreation says his crews are working to reopen the outdoor rink at the corner of Elmdale Street and Barkman Avenue. 

“It'll probably take us a few more days here to get everything patched up. Looking at it on Friday, we thought, 'oh, this doesn't look too bad', but I guess there were some small holes and when we were flooding, it wasn't super cold yet so some water was running away, creating some shell ice so we do have a little bit of flushing in to do.”  

Dyck adds “We do hope to have it open before the weekend and looking at the temperatures for the next couple of weeks, I think we should be good to have ice for a few weeks yet.” 

Steinbach also has a pleasure skating rink at the Jake Epp Library. Dyck says they aren’t yet sure if they will be able to reopen it this winter. 

“That one would be second priority in terms of rebuilding. With that one, unfortunately, we can't really close it off so people were skating on there when it was a little soft, so that probably did a little more damage to it, but we will be looking at that as well and if we can, we'll get that one going.” 

Meanwhile, Jason Peters, the Manager of Recreation Services in the RM of Hanover, says his crews are also in full recovery mode right now.  

“We hope by the end of the week to have most of them up and running again. A couple of them are open as of today, I think we're open in Kleefeld and in New Bothwell and in the other communities we're working hard to get them up as soon as possible, hoping that by the weekend we should be open in most communities, if not all.” 

Unfortunately, things are looking a little less positive in La Broquerie. Community Services Coordinator for the RM of La Broquerie, David Little says with the warm weather over the last few weeks, they lost way more ice than they expected. 

“Usually we have about 5 inches on the ice and to make sure that everything's safe and taken care of on our outdoor rink and we're down to below an inch with lots of gravel showing.” 

Little says he is not confident they will be able to safely reopen the outdoor rink this winter.  

“Unfortunately, I think there's probably too much damage done with the warm weather. I'll never say never, but I'm not sure that we have enough extended cold weather in order to make it safe again. We've got our fingers crossed, we're watching it very, very closely, but unfortunately at this point it looks unlikely.”