This past February, over a hundred volunteers spent a full week working 15 hours a day in the rain, sleet and blowing snow to construct a world record-breaking ice maze for the 2010 Buffalo Powder Keg Winter Festival.
Their hard work is still paying off with the recent release of the 2011 Guinness World Book of Records, which happens to have the Buffalo ice maze pictured on its back cover.
Breaking a world record was obviously no small feat. The ice maze measured 12,855.68 square feet and had over 2,100 blocks of ice, weighing 300 pounds each. Arctic Glacier donated the ice and $20,000 was pooled by local businesses and foundations to pay to have the ice brought to HSBC plaza to assemble the maze. Dean Sutton Architects created the maze design, which featured a buffalo-shaped center. Roaming Buffaloes organized the project, but the labor was mainly carried out by over 100 volunteers.
“It was truly a moving experience to see how the people of Buffalo came forward to help,” said Jeff Empric, founder of Roaming Buffaloes and co-founder of the festival. According to Empric, some of the individuals who volunteered contributed over 60 hours to getting the project done on time. “On some nights at dinner time when our volunteers would diminish I would start to worry that we would never finish,” he said. “Then at 6:30, like clockwork, 40 people would show up and work late into the night. It brought tears to my eyes multiple times. This record truly belongs to the people of Buffalo.”
The volunteers were tenacious, to say the least. Like true Buffalonians, they persevered through some of winter’s harshest weather to get the maze up in time for the festival. According to Empric, the winds in the plaza reached 50 miles per hour at some points, with rain and snow coming down on top of that – workers also had to contend with a series of warmer sunny days that caused one of the walls to collapse. “What we accomplished that week with volunteers and whole community effort was amazing,” he said. “It would be logistically challenging in the best of weather conditions, but to pull it off in the weather that we battled through, it was amazing.”
To Empric, seeing the maze pictured on the back cover of the newest World Book of Records was a testament to the hardworking people of Buffalo and the pride they have in their city. “The maze wasn’t built by a corporation or a company. It wasn’t even built by people that specialize in ice creations. It was built by hardworking, caring people of Buffalo that wanted to see something good for their community,” Empric said. “People wanted to see our region get some good publicity for the beautiful winters that we have, and together we did that for Buffalo.”