Making Ice at Britannia

Many of you asked, “Kelly, what will you be doing in Vancouver?” Well, the last few days we have spent been in trainings and meeting the people that we will be working with for the next few weeks. Here is a brief overview of how things will work at Britannia. There are many different groups working for VANOC and I am part of Event Services or EVS. At Britannia, there are three venue supervisors, and we are responsible for supervising the volunteers that will be controlling the access from the outside (checking accreditation, doing the pre-screening information), controlling the access inside (press area, mix zone, and athetes' entrance) and the spectator area (friends and family and school group guests).
There are many other people that will also be working and volunteering in the venue. Transportation coordinates the teams' arrivals and departures from the village and Canada Hockey Place (CHP) (the Olympic name for GM Place). There are also people from Sport, they work with the teams to make sure that they have everything they need for their practices. They also expect a lot of media to be at the practices, so there is a Media manager and some volunteers to help out in the media lounge and in the mix zone. I may have got some of the titles wrong, but you get the main idea.
Another group that is important at and arena are the ice attendants. Since my first visit to the area, I noticed that the temperature was colder inside the arena than outside (BRRRRRRRR!) They have been preparing to build the ice and need it to be -8 degrees. The ice build has been under the direction of Dan Craig, the "Ice Guru", who has built the ice for the last Three Oympics and is also the Facility Operations Manager for the NHL. He was on hand today to supervise the build. It is important that the location of the lines matches the ones at CHP since they will not get to practice very often at CHP.
Once they had applied 2 or three layers of water, it was time to paint the lines. They made it look so easy. The coolest thing is that they let us paint the red line. I think we did an okay job,
we didn't see them making too many repairs once we left the ice!

Tomorrow is the first day that we are required to wear our uniforms. With 50,000 people working as part of the Olympic workforce, I think that it will be a sea of teal tomorrow in Vancouver!