The Frozen Tundra of PBS

[jjakq27]

http://news.enquirer.com/apps/pbcs.dll/art...SPT02/412240400

Here's a article from today's Enquirer about a thankless job. Shoveling PBS out in order to get the stadium ready for Sunday's game vs. the Giants. The paper had a good shot of the entire inner bowl of the stadium. It looked like there were some plows clearing the field.

Anybody remember the game vs. Jacksonville a few years ago (2000?). I think someone refered to it as the Kitty Litter Bowl. I am glad we got the new turf this year.

"The job of removing 10 inches of snow from a 65,000-seat football stadium requires 400 feet of linear chute, 250 workers, five Bobcats and dumptrucks, and assorted pickups pushing plows.

The heavy snow of the past two days has presented Paul Brown Stadium management with a challenge rarely seen in NFL markets outside of Green Bay, Buffalo and Foxboro, Mass.

"It's a tedious job," Eric Brown, the stadium's managing director, said Thursday, when the job that started Wednesday night shifted into high gear.

Confident that the precipitation had ended, workers started removing snow from aisles, stairwells and seats in the upper reaches of the stadium.

The job should be completed well in advance of the Bengals' home finale Sunday afternoon against the New York Giants. In fact, the Bengals plan to practice on the field at 11:30 a.m. today.

To move the snow, workers constructed chutes fashioned from 30-inch-diameter plastic pipe that was cut in half. (Green Bay uses Teflon chutes in Lambeau Field because of the greater regularity and volume of snow-removal chores.)

Minus the chutes, the job is similar to, but more time-consuming than, large-volume trash disposal that occurs after events.

Chutes run from the top row to the club level below and the passageways that lead to the outer concourse. Workers move down the rows of seats, sweeping snow and shoveling it into the chutes.

The snow slides down the chutes.

Then Bobcats carry the snow from the passageways to dumptrucks. Dumptrucks run a relay to a vacant Hamilton County lot nearby at the site of the former Cinergy Field.

"We're building a mountain of snow over there," Brown said.

The stadium's synthetic FieldTurf playing surface is covered by a tarp, per NFL regulations. The tarp was put down Tuesday night because the sub-surface heating system would not have been able to melt the large volume of snow that accumulated.

Snow also will be dumped from the lower seating bowl onto the field level and removed by Bobcats and dumptrucks through the large passageway in the northwest corner.

The cost of stadium snow removal, which Brown said he could not begin to estimate until today, is the responsibility of Hamilton County through Saturday, according to the team's stadium lease. The Bengals are responsible for any snow-removal costs on game day, Brown said.

The full-time stadium crew is at work. Aramark Facility Services provided workers hired from a temporary agency.

The game is a sellout, the Bengals announced Thursday.

When the snow-removal job is done, fans should see no sign inside the stadium of the heavy lifting.

FieldTurf, a long-blade, in-fill synthetic field, was installed during the summer to ensure good playing conditions on days such as Sunday.

"The field will be green and dry," Bengals business manager Bill Connelly said. "

[bengalboomer7]

Even though I love the new field, this is one time where as a fan I wish we had the old grass, just think how crazy it could have been.

By the way, I live in Mansfield, oh (not in the prison either, I don't know why everyone asks that) and I've got two feet of snow outside my door, plus my family lives in Brown County (ripley, oh) and the whole county is without power.

Man, mother nature can be a bitch sometimes cant she.

[jjakq27]

http://www.bengals.com/press/news.asp?iCur...=0&news_id=2660

They were paying $8 an hour for people to help shovel the stadium out today.