January 6, 2010 by JackHarvey •

It’s in our soda and lemonade, keeps the beer in the canoes cold and tops off every bucket of fish for our animals. Some of the animals even like to play with it and we use it as a reinforcer for them. What is it? Ice.

Ice is used everywhere at SeaWorld and instead of having 30 little ice machines everywhere from restaurants to show stadiums, we have one really big one. Well, actually it’s two machines that can each produce 2,400 lbs of ice in 24 hours. And there’s a dedicated group of team members that bag it into 40 lb bags and deliver it to over 30 stops around the park.

They start around 5:00 a.m., and on a normal operating day, deliver 40-50 pallets of ice throughout the park. Each pallet is made of 25 bags (remember each bag is 40 lbs). So that’s close to 50,000 lbs of ice used at SeaWorld San Antonio each day!

After the four and a half hours it takes to deliver ice to everyone from Shamu to the water park, they spend the rest of their day, bagging ice. The team can bag about 12 pallets per hour – that’s 1 bag every 12 seconds. Once bagged and stacked on palates, the ice is stored in a walk in freezer the size of my apartment. It can hold 96 palates of ice, which is usually good for a day or two, unless we’re super busy.

July 4 is usually our busiest day of the year with thousands of people visiting the park. Well, it’s busy for the ice plant crew, too. On July 4, 2009, they delivered 100 super-palates (30 bags, instead of 25) that day. That’s 120,000 lbs of ice!

Now, why do we use so much? Besides the fact that thousands of people come to SeaWorld each day, it melts. The Ice Plant’s freezer is kept right at 32º F to prevent the ice from forming rocks, which isn’t good for the stacking process. With temperatures that close to freezing, a lot of it melts during the process of storing and bagging, but it doesn’t go to waste. We collect that water, similar to how we collect air conditioning run-off and it is piped to the cooling towers of the chillers that keep the animal pools water cold. So far this year, we’ve saved over 1 million gallons of water from going down those drains.

So next time you have a Pepsi, pull that aluminum bottle of Bud Light out of the canoe, or see a trainer dump a bucket of ice in Shamu’s mouth (trust me, a few of them love that), take a second to think about all the hard work that went into getting that ice there.

Thanks and Gig ‘em,

Jack

Related posts:

1. The Greener Side of SeaWorld San Antonio
2. Check Out These Cool Chicks! Penguins at SeaWorld Are Breeding
3. Composting at SeaWorld

Tags: cold, condensation, conservation, ice plant, SeaWorld San Antonio, Water conservation

Posted in Around the Park, conservation