Ice mountain comes crashing down on local cottage
Wind-driven ice piles over deck, breaks through a window and leaves a mess behind
Don Pouliot has seen many things on Round Lake since 1990, in every season. Then came Saturday, when the frozen lake came ashore, and inside.
As Ottawa was basking in glorious weather, Pouliot, 76, discovered a combination of wind and spring melt had dumped a mountain of ice on his property, breaking through the front window and into the living room in dramatic fashion. It looked as though a bulldozer or giant ice machine had poured hundreds of ice blocks indoors, shoving the furniture aside and leaving him in awe of nature’s power.
“Amazing to me. It’s absolutely amazing. I just can’t believe it,” he said Wednesday.
There is so much ice inside, in blocks about 15 centimetres thick — and so few places to put it — he’s decided to let it melt for now, opening a small drain on the wooden floor and tarping the shattered picture window.
Round Lake has periodically known freakish ice damage. Sitting about 40 kilometres west of Eganville, it is a large, shallow lake (some 30 square kilometres) that is hydro-controlled as part of the Bonnechere River system.
Pouliot explained how the layer of spring ice, at breakup, is not well anchored because the bottom is both sandy and shallow and the lake water beneath is on the move with the freshet. As the pack warms and turns into socalled shale or frazil ice, the wind and wave action breaks it into ever smaller pieces. (He’s in Sand Bay, the eastern side of the lake, which would receive much of the fractured ice along prevailing western winds.)
Now throw in Friday’s wicked windstorm, where speeds reached to the 100 km/h range. ( Video shows ice bricks literally tumbling over themselves to form advancing piles.)
Pouliot, retired from BNR and Nortel, said he and his wife Elinor — who winter in Wilno — had a phone call from a year-round lake neighbour on Saturday morning saying ice had piled up at the front of the property, damaging the deck, which is about a metre off the ground at the front. They arrived at about 1 p.m. to inspect the damage.
The deck was no more. “The (waterfront) deck was sitting exactly at 90 degrees, straight up, vertical against the cottage.” It caused no great distress, he said, because he’s repaired the deck often during the last 30 years. They left about 3 p.m., only to have an update at 7 p.m. from his son, who had stopped by for his own inspection.
The ice had, literally, climbed over itself to smash the front window and invade half the main living area.
“I was quite surprised at the second ice push. It was really amazing.”
At the next inspection, they could see they weren’t alone. A neighbour’s boathouse had the boat driven right out the rear wall. Pouliot said several other boathouses were also damaged.
His daughter’s gazebo, meanwhile, was picked up and shoved off its moorings.
Round Lake experienced a variation of monster ice damage in 1995. That spring, great pans of ice were forced up onto shore for a five-kilometre stretch of the lake, damaging as many as 70 properties and reworking the profile of the shoreline as though a bulldozer had come by.
Pouliot has been in contact with his insurance company but isn’t yet sure about a damage estimate. There will be window and deck replacements, for sure, but it’s unclear how much harm was done to the bottom of the window frames, which lie buried in ice.
He said there are two known types of ice phenomena on the lake. The kind that occurred on the weekend at breakup and, secondly, the “thermal expansion” of ice that sometimes occurs in January, with large fluctuations in temperature. (For a sheet of lake ice two kilometres wide, a 10 C warming in winter can cause a shoreline expansion of about one metre, a possibly havoc-making change.)
Pouliot and his wife usually live in the cottage about six months a year. “I do like the location. It’s given us years and years of pleasurable summers.”
And memories. Ice-cold drinks on the deck will never be the same. To contact Kelly Egan, please call 613-726-5896 or email kegan@ postmedia.com Twitter.com/ kellyegancolumn