Ice Racing Finale Canceled.

[CurtEgerer]

Haven't got the official eMail yet, but I'm going to go ahead and assume we won't be running this weekend This ice floe occurred right where the course is set along Linwood Beach here in Mich.

Hey Jim G - was your mother's home damaged?

[edmayo]

Okay Curt, I'll bite, what causes that to happen? (besides the obvious, cold and water)

[Jim Garfield]

Curt, no her house is OK - thanks for asking. Those pictures are about a quarter mile south of her. Looks as though you might have some work at Linwood Beach.
I was just thinking about the ice races last week, did you get a chance to run this year? They seem to have had bad luck with their schedule the last couple years.

Ed, this happens once every 15 or 20 years (this is the third time I've seen it, so you can guess how old I must be...). Usually it's when the ice starts to break up with a west wind blowing. The ice moves across the lake towards Canada, then a strong nor'easter starts blowing and the ice gets enough momentum that it piles up on the East shore like that.

This wasn't too bad - not much damage. I've seen it in the past where the ice has knocked houses right off their foundations and crushed them.

[CurtEgerer]

I think the last time this happened was in the late 80's. It was quite a bit worse and I investigated several houses that were knocked off their foundations. As I recall there were very large chunks of ice that time, as opposed to what seem to be almost crushed ice this time.

RE: ice races: it really sucked this year. Despite the record snow and cold, they just couldn't get the right conditions on the right weekends. They only ran once and it was basically slush racing, not ice racing!

[CurtEgerer]

A couple of pics from the 1946 ice:

[CurtEgerer]

Curt, no her house is OK - thanks for asking. Those pictures are about a quarter mile south of her. Looks as though you might have some work at Linwood Beach.

I'm going out to look at the house in those photos today. I guess they've got the ice cleared away from it. I'm actually thinking the structural damage is minimal based upon the 'crushed' ice that would tend to dissipate the forces (as opposed to the usual huge sheets of ice). We'll see.

[CurtEgerer]

A couple of more pics from Fri. It's crazy out there. 20-25 foot tall piles of ice along the beach as far as the eye can see. It's like piles of giant ice cubes (maybe 10"x10"x10"). The previous photo with the ice coming thru the window is a house I inspected. The owner told me it was about 10PM. She heard a weird noise, looked out the window and saw a wall of ice moving toward her By the time she ran upstairs to grab her kids it broke through the house. About 30-60 seconds total.