By BOB SHRALUKA
WZBD.com
The arena floor of the Allen County War Memorial Coliseum in Fort Wayne has taken on a radical new look these days as a new ice plant is part of an ongoing upgrade of the floor.
Coliseum officials say they expect the work – which was two years in the planning and began June 9 – to be completed by mid-October.
The Fort Wayne Komets home opener for the 2025-26 season has been pushed back from its usual time of the year and will now be held Nov. 21. The team will play the first two weeks of its schedule on the road.
Cost of the floor upgrade and new ice plant installation is $6,463,100.
Coliseum Executive Vice President and General Manager Kim Carney says ice plants are expected to last 20-25 years and the Coliseum’s current system was installed in 2002.
In order to avoid having the ice plant break down in the middle of a hockey season, Carney says, the Coliseum replaces its plant every 20 or so years.
“We have gutted everything that was originally here, and now we’re rebuilding everything back,” Carney told WANE-TV.
Corporate Design & Management in Auburn and Cimco, an Alabama firm, are building the new CO2-based plant.
According to a July 16 statement posted by the Coliseum, a plastic vapor barrier has been placed over the arena’s concrete floor, followed by Styrofoam insulation board and another vapor barrier.
Then, 1,600 chairs were placed; they are the metal “M” shaped pieces. The crew then places rebar on top of the chairs and once complete, will have placed 33,000 linear feet of rebar.
Once all the rebar is laid, the Coliseum statement said, it will be tied together with tie wire and stainless-steel tubing will be laid on top of the chairs. Then, the tubing will be pressure tested before wire mesh is installed.
Inspections will be done before concrete is poured.
Other team members weld together the headers, which are the large “U” shaped pieces that are installed on either end of the rink, according to the Coliseum statement. The headers will connect to the skid, supplying the rink with C02 from one end, then pushing it back toward the skid from the other.
Under the floor on which the ice is built are 200-foot lengths of copper steel piping that process CO2 (carbon dioxide). The pipes are connected to compressors and chillers that drop the temperature of the CO2 to 14 degrees.
A slight bit of water is placed on the floor. Once it freezes, the process is repeated until the ice is about an inch thick.
The ice is an important asset for the Coliseum, Carney told WANE.
“There’s intersectionality there. We want to make sure the Komets stay in Fort Wayne and so to continue hosting them, we’ve got to be able to put a good slab of ice for them to win some games on,” she said.
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