Dan Craig wakes up and checks his phone. National Hockey League vice presidents of facilities operations _ they're just like us.
Except Craig isn't up at 7 a.m., checking his texts or Twitter. He's up at 2:30 a.m., looking at a custom-built app designed to monitor the temperature of the ice housed in rinks at the league's outdoor games. In this case, he's monitoring the build for Saturday's Stadium Series game at Heinz Field between the Penguins and Philadelphia Flyers.
If Craig sees 22 degrees Fahrenheit or thereabouts, he goes back to sleep. If not, it's time to make a move.
"I roll over, and I check (the app), and if it's something that's not right, I just put my jeans on and come down and I see what's going on," Craig said Tuesday at Heinz Field.
He was speaking from the seats near center ice _ or what will be center ice by Saturday. The pressing issue of the day, and week, are unseasonably warm temperatures. As Craig spoke, it was about 65 degrees on the North Shore.
The temperature of the ice, though, is where it needs to be: 22.5 degrees, with a quarter-inch already made and three-eighths more on the way Tuesday night. Ice, typically, is about three-quarters of an inch thick, meaning there should be only about one-eighth of an inch left to spray down between Wednesday and Friday, when teams are set to practice.
Coordinating with them, Craig says, is someone else's department.
"They know that when they're scheduled to be ready," he said, "we'll be ready."
It's not going to get any cooler, though; Wednesday's high is 67 degrees, Thursday's is 70 and Friday's is 73, according to AccuWeather. That's not an issue, Craig said, given that the NHL has held two outdoor games in California and one in Denver when temperatures were similar.
"We have all of our data that we have out of those three venues," Craig said. "We're running the same truck, we're running the same floor."
That pump truck, parked outside Heinz Field, circulates 300 tons of coolant through 365 feet of six-inch mains to tubes in aluminum pans, housed below the elevated ice deck. The trip takes 90 seconds.
"That little baby back there can be a dragster," Craig said of the truck. "Sometimes you have to watch, it can overrun you if you're not careful."
Plus, temperatures are on track to drop to 40 degrees by puck drop.
"Forty?" Craig said. "We like 40."
The other potential roadblock is rain, which is in the forecast Saturday. The league has gotten better at dealing with that since the 2011 Winter Classic, also at Heinz Field, which was delayed several hours and played in, let's say, sub-optimal conditions.
There's no precipitation in the forecast until game day, when the ice-making process should be long complete. Then, Craig's task is more about making sure condensation on the ice surface freezes quickly, removing whatever doesn't and then ensuring that the surface is suitably flat.
"We've had a couple events now that we've had heavy rains," Craig said. "We got a good crew that is very well-versed on the way that we're gonna remove excess. We monitor it and we run the (coolant) truck as hard as we can until it can't keep up anymore, and then we have a strategy to remove ice off the back end of the rink."
That strategy involves custom-built, smaller-than-standard "zamboni" machines. On the other end of the spectrum are the thermal blankets _ reflective on the top side, white on the back side _ that were protected on the ice from Tuesday afternoon's sunlight. You can buy something similar at Home Depot.
Those stay in place until temperatures drop to the low 50s or the sun goes down, Craig said.
All that contributes to a mindset where the word "impossible" disappears from Craig's vocabulary. In other words, they're going to play, no matter what.
"I don't go to a 'Plan B,' " he said. "Nope. I just don't. Nope. That's not even ... It's just one of those things _ we're gonna make it happen, and it happens."
