The organizers of Dressage at Devon announced that the new footing in the warm up area is now complete, giving horse and rider the benefit of consistent footing from schooling to the show ring.
This was the third and final riding surface to be redone and has been, by far, the largest of the three projects. For the third year in a row, Equestrian Services International was engaged to provide the all-weather footing. This year, however, the project went much deeper, literally, than installing a new surface. The entire schooling area was excavated to install a new drainage system. Brett Raflowitz, the founder and president of ESI, broke it down by the numbers: the schooling area at Devon is 135’ by 250’, that’s almost three time the size of an Olympic dressage arena. Massive earth moving machines dug up mountains of soil and then installed almost 1Ž2 a mile of drainage pipe which is set into 3,500 tons of drainage rock. That’s 700,000 pounds, the equivalent of 42 elephants. Once the schooling area was reassembled, 800 tons of sand was mixed with the felt product that creates the footing.
In addition to all of the work in the schooling area, the drainage of the Dixon Oval was further improved on with the installation of sub-surface drainage piping.
Redoing the schooling area completes the three-year, three-phase project of making all of the riding surfaces FEI compliant. Compliance is of extreme importance to long time Devon Horse Show and Country Fair partner, Dressage at Devon, so much so that they assisted in the fund-raising effort to support the initiative. With all three surfaces in compliance, Dressage at Devon can look forward to calling Devon home for many more years to come.
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