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SALT LAKE CITY — July marked one of the hottest months on record in Salt Lake City with over 18 days reaching over 100 degrees, and local ice makers have been in high demand this summer.
"This is probably the busiest summer we've had in 20, 25 years," said Kerry Fonnesbeck of Bagley Ice and Carbonic in Salt Lake City.
In the ice business in Utah, just like the weather, this summer is one for the record books.
"We make ice 24 hours a day," Fonnesbeck said.
Stu Bagley started the company in 1942, hauling ice to Kennecott Utah Copper and restaurants. He would have turned 100 this month, and it's still a family run company. If Bagley was still alive and delivering ice, he would have been a very busy man this summer.
"He did home delivery, where you chop the block, put it on your back, and carry it into the house," Fonnesbeck said of Bagley's work.
During the starting years of the company, many homes didn't have electricity and refrigerators.
Fonnesbeck married into the business and has been making and delivering ice more than 30 years. He said when the temperature spikes, so does the demand for ice.
"We haven't been able to stock any ice since June," he said. "It goes out the door as fast as we make it."
In the summer, the ice plant is humming at a cool temperature seven days a week, putting out 10,000 bags a day, totaling 25 tons of clear, cold, beautiful ice.
The workers at Bagley Ice and Carbonic fill up their storage freezer once everyday with 30 pallets of ice this summer. During the winter, they only have to fill the freezer once a week.
"It goes into overload in the summertime," said manager Brad Burr.
The icemaker is a tall blue cylinder about 4 feet in diameter. Inside the cylinder, there are more than 160 stainless steel tubes where the water freezes, and at the bottom of the cylinder, a blade cuts the ice into cubes.
"From the ice machine itself, there's a series of augers, and it shoots up into this bin back here, and this fills up over night," Burr said.
All of the cubed ice is shot into a bagging machine.
"It fills up the bags, we tie it, put it on a pallet and take it down to the store's freezer," Burr said.
During the heat of the summer, the workers at Bagley Ice and Carbonic fill up their storage freezer once every day with 30 pallets of ice. They deliver all of it and empty the freezer every day. During the winter, they only have to fill the freezer once a week.
"With this stretch of heat, this 100-degree weather, it's brutal out there," Fonnesbeck said.
All of their ice is bound for store freezers, restaurants, the Salt Lake Bees baseball games, ReAL soccer games and local consumers. The Bagley Ice logo on the bags sports an image of Stu Bagley carrying a massive load of ice on his back.
