ADA Wheelchair Ramp

There are lots of things that you can do with a dedicated ice curling club that can be very hard to do with an arena based one.  But one of the most important is the ability to increase our programming to include curling opportunities for people with special needs, including but not limited to those with wheelchairs.  Inside our club we have taken the necessary steps to be ADA compliant, but probably the last big task (outside of actually making the ice) was to install the wheelchair ramp to get into our building.

Personally, I expected this to be a somewhat easy task, simply bolting together all of the parts.  “Famous last words” would apply to that thought.  For starters, despite working on this on September 28, it was over 90 degrees outside while we stood in the direct sunlight and on freshly sealed blacktop.  Then, there were no instructions, and we didn’t exactly know how to put everything together.

After about 8 hour of labor put in by several people, and a few small sunburns, we were finally done… well mostly anyway.  You can see in the pictures below that our raised entrance currently has a perimeter railing.  We are going to have to cut out a section of that railing and blend the old railing with the railing of the ramp, but that is a small thing comparatively.