THUNDER BAY — Warm weather has led to the closure of outdoor skating rinks throughout Thunder Bay this week.
These closures follow roughly five days of unseasonably high temperatures hovering around 0 C.
Skaters had a short time on the ice this year before the closure.
Cory Halvorsen, manager of Parks and Open Spaces for the City of Thunder Bay, visited the unsupervised boarded rink at Dease Park on Monday, one of many rinks closed citywide. He said the City had all but one site open and in use by Dec. 23, ‘which was excellent.’
“We were able to have them open over Christmas, but then unfortunately, by the end of the week, by Friday, we had to close due to the warmer temperatures, so all the sites have been marked as closed since that point,” said Halvorsen.
With these closures, he said the City is commencing flooding on all sites and will have some updates on Monday.
This rink re-flooding timeline will vary across the city.
‘It’s a real mixture,’ Halvorsen explained.
“Our supervised sites have staff on-site, so they’ll be actively flooding, as much as possible during their shifts and once the surface has been retained again, they’ll be opening. All of the other unsupervised sites, we have tankers going out. Some of those sites also have water supplies,” said Halvorsen.
Looking ahead, he said the forecast is promising and once the rinks are open again they "should be good for some time."
Daytime highs are expected to fall to -13 C later in the week, with overnight lows of -23 C on Saturday into Sunday.
“Many of them do look in good condition, as the temperatures fall below zero. So, we have a good chance of recovering quite quickly,” said Halvorsen.
Officials also say the City does not plan to hold off again on their opening.
Right now, Halvorsen said the City will only go into closures if it’s been warm enough to impact the ice surface to where it’s not safe to use, which usually takes a couple of days plus 3 C or 2 C with sun.
“If it hovers around 0⁰C and we’re open, we can typically stay open. The forecast looks optimistic right now, so again, we’ll be looking at all sites today. We could see some sites opening as soon as tomorrow,” said Halvorsen.
He encourages residents to watch the outdoor rink map as the best way to get rink status updates or look on-site for the closed signs on most of the sites to come down.
“Stay tuned over the next one to two days and we should see a lot of openings at the outdoor rinks,” said Halvorsen.
Residents can find rink status updates on the City’s website and its real-time outdoor rinks map, showing which sites are open or closed.
