Nashville Predators' Bridgestone Arena Has a New Broadcast Infrastructure The downtown Nashville mainstay is finally fully recovered from a devastating flood in 2022 By Dan Daley, Audio Editor
Wednesday, November 6, 2024 - 7:00 am
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Black Friday 2022 was indeed a dark day. When a water-main break flooded downtown Nashville, millions of gallons of water poured through Bridgestone Arena, home to the NHL Predators, at around 6 a.m. on the day after Thanksgiving. The venue suffered millions of dollars in damage and had to postpone games for three days because of water 3 ft. deep in some areas, including the broadcast-control rooms.
The hockey resumed quickly, thanks to a herculean effort by the arena's staff and more than a dozen agencies and service providers, but full recovery took more than a year. A month into the new NHL season, the Bridgestone and the Preds have a reconstructed media infrastructure.
Bridgestone Arena's Jacob Lutz: We launched our new control room in the middle of a season. Over the summer, we dialed everything in closely, to make the facility what it can be.
The control room went down Black Friday of 2022, recalls Jacob Lutz, director, tech operations, Bridgestone Arena. We [produced] hockey three days later out of the small TNDV Red truck. Then we brought in Lyon-17 video truck on the first of December and used that until the 2023 CMA Awards in November 2023. It would've been almost a whole year under those circumstances. Right after the CMA Awards, we had a two-week period to finish the final commissioning and get online. We played hockey and used our new control room that first game the Saturday after CMA Awards. We pretty much worked through the night, got the room up, got it going, and haven't looked back since.
Said Predators CEO Sean Henry at the time, It would have been easy to shut the building down for 20, 30, 40, 50 days. Relocate the games. Work a deal with another city. Temporarily cancel or postpone concerts.
Instead, the production team decided to press on through the disaster. This season marks the first time the team is using the new broadcast infrastructure after it has been fully tweaked and fine-tuned.
We launched our new control room in the middle of a season, which is unheard of. Over the summer, we dialed everything in closely, to make the room all it can be, make the facility what it can be, Lutz says, noting that this was done even as some key staff positions changed, including the addition of VP of Game Presentation and Video Production, Dan Clark, Lutz's counterpart on the creative side. It was the first time an NHL team and venue had ever been taken out suddenly since it happened in Calgary some years ago. Even though we did get back up and running quickly, the full recovery has taken until now.
(A flood in June 2013 that ravaged parts of Southern Alberta inundated the Calgary Flames' Scotiabank Saddledome. The venue's event level was completely flooded, as was the control room for the video-replay screen, but the broadcast infrastructure was left largely intact. The timing gave the venue and team several months to recover before the start of the 2013 NHL season.)
Updates, Technology and Otherwise Restoring the infrastructure included adding a DiGiCo Quantum338 front-of-house audio console, which also feeds the game broadcasts, as well as new video displays around the arena concourse. Among other new gear are a Ross FR12 Ultrix Acuity switcher and a Riedel Artist 1024-frame comms system with MADI- and AES67-conversion capability.
Also new is a strengthened disaster-response plan for the venue, which sits five blocks from the Cumberland River, whose devastating 2011 flood cost an estimated $2 billion in reconstruction.
A water-main break in 2022 flooded parts of Bridgestone Arena, causing millions of dollars' worth of damages.
We did a number of key improvements and modifications to the space, Lutz explains. We raised the flooring system in a way that, if we have another a hundred-year flood, there's now a drainage pathway. Our control room is still on ground level; in most arenas, it's on the top floor. In 2010, the water came up from below, being so close to a river. You can't prepare for everything, obviously, but there's a lot that you can prepare for. Especially with everything that's going on in the Carolinas right now, it's timely having disaster-recovery plans and having everything ready for when you do have that dark midnight hour.
We're right at the corner of one of the busiest streets in the U.S., he continues. We're not moving, so it's all about how we make the best of the space that we have and improve it. That's the name of the game that we're in right now.
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Nashville Predators' Bridgestone Arena Has a New Broadcast Infrastructure The downtown Nashville mainstay is finally fully recovered from a devastating flood in 2022 By Dan Daley, Audio Editor 
