Never been to a monster truck rally, but they’ve been shilling one on tv recently. Seems to be the same guy that does all of the commercial voice-overs too. Anyhow there’s lots of shots of dirt covered arena floors and huge jumps made of dirt. Which got me to thinking, that’s a heck of a lot of dirt to be lugging around in trucks. I’m trying to imagine 5 or 10 tractor trailers filled with dirt, in addition to a few more to haul around the monster trucks, bikes, etc. Sounds expensive, and a bit odd, to have a bunch of trucks hauling dirt from city to city when it’s available right from the ground. The alternative though, is they’d have to buy “fresh” dirt at every stop and have it transported to the arenas. Where would they buy it from? It’d have to be pretty clean dirt, you wouldn’t want to risk flat tires or crashes resulting from say, a piece of metal or a broken bottle or something.
So, where does the dirt come from? Is it hauled from arena to arena, or bought fresh at every stop? How many trucks are used? How do they clean up the arenas afterwards? I know the local arena is also used for hockey (Penguins), are the monster truck people required to clean every speck of dirt off the floor? How long does it take?
No, that is what they do. It doesn’t come in on 18 wheelers and all dirt is new. They aren’t fitted for that. It comes locally in on big dump trucks and spread by equipment like bulldozers. The dirt they use for truck rallies is low quality and although it has to be purchased, it is very economical when spread across ticket prices. The arenas are very good at that type of thing. They can construct a monster truck arena one week, host a rodeo (with very different dirt) the next week, a sporting event the next, a rock concert the week after that, and then a trade show.
It is quite amazing to a layperson and just in general but there are an awful lot of people qualified employed to make that happen. Like lots of things, including how your eggs get to the supermarket there are people with advanced degrees that manage other people which specialized knowledge to get it done. Large arenas have huge bay doors to do what they need to do and the professionals on staff to make it happen. They are designed for extremely rapid redesign.
It is really just a phenomenon of scale. There is a lot of money to go around and $200,000 worth of dirt (just as an example) is a drop in the bucket. The design of the stadiums themselves allows this to happen quickly and easily. They are a true Modern Marvel.
Speaking of an arena that has been multi-purpose for decades, Tingley Coliseum in Albuquerque used to host the New Mexico Scorpions (minor-league hockey) as well as all sorts of other things, including concerts, rodeos, circuses, and I believe a few monster truck rallies. Of course they have to truck in lots of dirt for the rodeos, much like they would a monster truck rally. Several years ago (sorry, can’t find a link) there was a rodeo where the dirt destroyed the ice that was below. So they do have to be careful if there’s a rink underneath.
I’ll second what Shagnasty said. I used to be a stagehand at the local arena, and while I never did a monster truck rally we routinely did rock bands where 10-25 semis arrived at 8:00 AM and everything was in place by the 5:00 PM soundcheck. It’s amazing what can be done by an organized, experienced crew.
Dump truck operators are usually self employed and would be more than willing to clear a certain day if the price was right. They’re also good at managing how the dirt comes off the truck, which would minimize the amount of bulldozer work required. Beyond that, I would guess that the traveling crew for the monster truck show have learned over the years just how much fill dirt they can get in a day from each local aggregates plant on their tour route.
My question was, what happens to the dirt afterwards? Do the venue operators just “lease” the dirt from companies, who remove it and take it back to where they got it from when the event is over? That seems easier than trying to recoup a bit of money from trying to sell it.
No, you can learn how to do that. The other part of doing that is the recording engineer–a good one can make your recording sound just like the guy on the monster truck ads on TV.
And yes, I do have a monster truck ad sample on my voice demo reel.
I’ve worked at such an arena, and that would never happen.
The arena base floor is concrete, with cooling tubes embedded inside it to freeze the ice. When used for a dirt-floor event, the ice is melted & drained away, and the dirt is spread on the bare concrete floor. After that event, the dirt is removed, water is poured onto the concrete, and the cooler tubes freeze that into ice for a rink-floor event.
Event scheduling is done so that there is sufficient time between events to do these changes. (A trained crew can do them in s surprisingly short period of time.)
You would never leave the ice there, and dump dirt over the top of it. The ice would melt, and soon turn that dirt into mud. With an unlevel floor, and slippery ice underneath parts of the floor, with uneven traction. Not suitable for a monster truck venue at all.
Some venues do schedule events very closely, and have the capability of covering the ice rink with a plywood floor. But that is generally covered with a carpet, and used to seating or trade-show type booth space. You wouldn’t cover it with dirt for a dirt-floor event. The footing would be too unsteady for such events. Plus this would be likely to damage your wood cover floor, making it costly. (Tightly scheduled events like this would already be paying premium rent for this.)
Well, they screwed up somehow. I had the impression they just dumped the dirt on top of the ice after covering the ice, but it could have been something else. Anyway, I do remember the news reports and pictures of the dirty brown ice after it had happened.
Sounds like they failed to get their floor cover tight before they dumped the dirt on top of it, and dirt leaked through onto the ice. Then the activity on top would have ground that dirt into the ice – very bad for skating on!
When they removed the dirt & cover floor and found this, they would have had to scrape off the ice until all the ground-in dirt was removed, then flood it with water and re-freeze to the appropriate depth of ice.
Except that takes time, and if they were covering it with dirt in the first place, it’s because they had 2 events scheduled without sufficient time between them to redo the ice. So the poor skaters probably had to try to skate on thin ice or on ice not fully frozen. Not good!