Flooding brings steep repair costs for ice arena in Jefferson City

Washington Park Ice Arena is still cleaning up after flooding twice in a little over a month in Jefferson City.

ABC 17 News reported the building was filled with water after heavy rains in early September, just one week after it reopened from flooding in August.

The total repairs will cost nearly $400,000.

City council approved a budget amendment to accept nearly $323,000 of insurance money this week to cover repair costs from the August flooding. Parks and Recreation estimates it will still need about $75,000 more to cover damage from the second flooding.

“It’s really hard to take when you finally get it cleaned up and you think you’re ready to go and then just have it
happen again,” the arena’s Recreation Supervisor Kerri Gates said. “It’s hard.”

Skaters are back enjoying time on the ice, but there is still work to do. And the repairs are not expected to be finished for a few more weeks.

“Probably the biggest damage that we had was losing the ice,” Parks Resources & Forestry Division Director J. J. Gates said. “And we had to replace the ice twice–after each flood. After the first flood, we had all this flooring that needed to come up so we didn’t have any mold issues.”

The heavy rains wrecked havoc in nearly every corner of the building from the ice to the entrance.

But cleaning up the damage was not the only financial hit.

“It was a pretty big impact,” Kerri Gates said. “I mean obviously, when you have to cancel a whole
set of lessons, you’re losing ice time from all the hockey teams and that’s a lot of money.”

But with the arena back up and running in time for the holidays, Parks and Recreation is looking for ways to prevent it from happening again.

“We’re reaching out to the engineering folks to kind of pick their brains to see what we can do and can’t,” J.J. Gates said. “So we’re still looking into a firm that can help us answer some of those questions.”