STEVE INSKEEP, Host:
Sports fans in Boston do not need to spend this New Year's Day watching football, because they have an alternative at Boston's Fenway Park. The old baseball stadium will be hosting an outdoor hockey game. Gemma Hooley spent some time watching preparations for the Winter Classic.
GEMMA HOOLEY: Dan Craig is the National Hockey League's ice man. For the last couple of weeks, he and his crew have been turning the green grass of Fenway Park into a perfect sheet of ice.
DAN CRAIG: Ask (unintelligible) where there might be a squeegee and grab one of the guys and put some pretty good water down here. See this air pocket here. Well, all that will happen is that will turn white. That will just turn into frost if we don't get the water right through it.
HOOLEY: Staging this match up between the Bruins and the Flyers took 20,000 gallons of water, 3,000 gallons of coolant and 350 gallons of white paint. And if patience came in gallons, there'd be thousands of those, too. Craig's son Mike is on a nine man crew spraying water to build ice.
MIKE CRAIG: Basically, you want to build layers and build it thin so each layer has a chance to bond to the layer below it. And you build a solid, thick dense sheet that way. It takes a very long time. I have to be very patient.
HOOLEY: The pipes run through the stadium and out onto the street where they're connected to a refrigeration truck.
RICHARD BEER: You're basically standing in a refrigeration engine room.
HOOLEY: Engineer Richard Beer and his team constantly adjust the ice temperature.
BEER: Step over here I'll show you something. The NHL has asked for a 25 degree set point, ok? Now, right now we're 17 degrees. That's in part to do with the wind chill, ok? So we're way below temperature. This machine will not start until we get about 25 degrees. About a half a degree above set point and this machine comes online.
HOOLEY: While the ice crew freezes water on the rink, Don Renzulli is trying to figure out how to unfreeze water in Fenway Park's plumbing system.
DON RENZULLI: These buildings are not winterized. It's like a summerhouse on the lake. You close it up and go away.
HOOLEY: Renzulli heads up events for the hockey league. He has to get this near century old summer stadium ready for 37,000 fans in the middle of winter. So aside from juggling TV crews, pyrotechnics, video boards and plane flyovers, he also has a long list of seasonal worries.
RENZULLI: How do we pour soda and water and beer? How can we move product around come game day? People just show up and they think it's going to be a cold beer, bathrooms are going to have water.
HOOLEY: Meanwhile, Dan Craig is checking the weather forecast more often than a sailor on the high seas. He can outwit Mother Nature's thermostat with refrigeration techniques, but he can't control what comes from the sky.
CRAIG: We've got the wind, the air temperature, Doppler radar. We know what's coming up. We know where everything's going. And we have a system in the ice surface so I can read below the surface, on top of the surface, air temperature, humidity. And it updates every 15 minutes.
HOOLEY: For NPR News, I'm Gemma Hooley.
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