Crews flooding Rideau Canal to prepare ice for skating
The National Capital Commission is preparing the Rideau Canal for skating as residents and tourists hope this year won’t be a repeat of last winter. The Rideau Canal Skateway didn’t open at all in the winter of 2022-23, marking the first time in the Skateway’s history that there wasn’t a single day of skating. The NCC said in a post on the social media site X that crews were out Thursday night flooding a two-kilometre section of the Rideau Canal from Somerset Street to Patterson Creek.
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Last night, our teams did a partial flood on a 2 km section of the #RideauCanal[1] Skateway between Somerset Street and Patterson Creek. They use pumps to draw water from below the ice to flood the surface and help build the ice thickness needed to safely open the Skateway. pic.twitter.com/UWFdfKGwg8[2]
— Rideau Canal Skateway (@NCC_Skateway) January 5, 2024[3]
“(Crews) use pumps to draw water from below the ice to flood the surface and help build the ice thickness needed to safely open the Skateway,” the NCC said. The Skateway needs quality ice at least 30 cm thick to support the thousands of skaters who use it during the winter months.
Typically, it requires about two straight weeks of temperatures below -10 C to get the ice thick enough. For now, the ice remains too thin for skating. “The presence of work crews on the Skateway in the coming days is not a sign that the ice surface is stable – they are trained professionals,” the NCC said on Thursday.
The NCC began installing vendor equipment and huts along the stretch of the world’s largest skating rink in late October. Last year, a warmer than average winter, combined with snow and rain kept the skateway closed. The average daily mean temperature in Ottawa in December 2023 was -2.2 C, according to Environment Canada data — slightly above the average mean from 2022.
The average mean temperature for the first four days of 2024 is -4 C. The current forecast includes high temperatures of -9 C on Saturday and -6 C on Sunday, with lows around -10 C, but there’s a chance of warmer weather and rain by the middle of next week. Despite this, Environment Canada’s senior climatologist David Phillips says he is “confident” that there would be skating on the canal this winter.
“It may be a very short season – but I believe there will be enough cold.
I can’t believe it would be shut down two years in a row,” he told CTV Morning Live.
References
- ^ #RideauCanal (twitter.com)
- ^ pic.twitter.com/UWFdfKGwg8 (t.co)
- ^ January 5, 2024 (twitter.com)