Ever wonder how an indoor arena becomes a dirt track?

ON FRIDAY AND Saturday, monster trucks will roar inside Hampton Coliseum - racing, jumping and crushing to the crowds' delight. Exhaust fumes and noise will fill the air, along with one other key ingredient - dirt.

Those big trucks need a big pile of dirt to play in, but how do you turn an indoor coliseum into a dirt track?

Out back of the coliseum sits an unassuming, 25-foot- high mound of dirt. It's been there for a decade, just within sight of thousands of daily travelers rumbling along Interstate 64.

Grass sprouts on it during the summer, and it takes on a crusty coating in the winter. Seagulls use it as a perch. Life just passes by - except for the few times a year that the coliseum needs to get dirty.

Two weeks ago, Ben Topping was high atop the mound manning his 45,000 -pound excavator. He gnawed into the pile with the 42-inch bucket and filled waiting dump trucks.

He was coordinating the dirt move-in for that weekend's Toyota Arenacross Series, another coliseum dirt event in which motorcyclists race around a huge track. That event takes the whole mound. That's about 225 dump-truck loads - about 3,000 cubic yards - about 4,500 tons.

Topping started at one end of the 60- to 70-foot-long mound and methodically dismantled it.

"You always have to think about how you're doing it," he said. "You don't just go and start stabbing in there and just loading. There's a little art to it."

This is Topping's fifth year of dirty duty for Live Nation, the owner of the dirt pile and promoter of the two Monster Jams and the arenacross event.

It can take six to seven hours to load, haul and dump the dirt onto the coliseum's concrete floor.

"It's not too bad," Topping said about that day's cold, overcast conditions. "We've done it in a light snow. The last Monster Jam we had to do it in the rain. It's a time thing. We usually don't stop for a break. We roll."

Is this expensive, hard-to- find, special dirt?

"We call it common fill dirt," Topping said. "Which is not bad or anything. It's just common dirt."

The buildup

After the first few trucks had dumped their loads into the far end of the coliseum, the air inside took on a musty smell. The clangs, bangs and thuds echoed as thin clouds of dust wafted toward the high domed ceiling. Workers hung sheets of yellow plastic around the arena from the elevated front-row seats to the floor.

Pete Henderson formed a mound at the far end of the floor with his bulldozer and paused to direct a driver where to dump the next load.

Henderson, a track builder for Live Nation, said that he and his crew help build about 20 such tracks around the country each year.

Henderson said the arena-cross layout would have many more curves, banks and jumps than the Monster Jam track, which needs only a few ramps.

"The biggest key is to always have it laid out before you start," he said. "That way, when trucks start coming, you build as you go. So when that last load is getting dumped, you are pretty much backfilling the starting gate, and the track is more or less completed."

Once a weekend of dirt shows ends, Topping goes back to work, sometimes until early morning. The dirt is pushed into the middle of the coliseum floor, scooped up and hauled out. But rebuilding the mound requires care. Topping doesn't want to have to deal with a soggy 4,500-ton pile next time he digs into it.

"We use a bulldozer to reshape the hill," Topping said. "We track it in real hard and just round it off so it handles the rain throughout the year. If it's wet, it's nasty."

Time for a clean sweep

Joe Tsao, the coliseum's director for 13 years, knows that when the dump trucks have left, his cleaning crew gets rolling.

"It's a huge job, and it's a dirty job," Tsao said.

Air filters must be replaced. The scoreboard is lowered and washed, the seats get a special scrubbing, and the lights and speaker clusters get a good wiping.

"Oh, yeah, that all comes as part of the package," Tsao said. "So we have to do not only the superficial cleaning, but once a year after all the dirt shows are over, we have to do a deep cleaning as well."

Tsao said that even though the events are more work for the coliseum crew, most everyone looks forward to them, and the events sure sell tickets.

"People enjoy coming to those events that require the dirt. They love the noise, they love the power, they love the smell of the exhaust and they love seeing the dirt fly."

Roy Bahls, (757) 446-2351 roy.bahls@pilotonline.com