ICICLE DOWN
Erik Foster begins the difficult task of dismantling a giant icicle on the side of an apartment building in the 1100 block of Avenue W North on Friday. A resident in the building adjacent to it was concerned it would break off and crash through her window. Please see story and photo on
Piece by piece, Saskatoon’s infamous icicle was slowly hacked apart Friday.
Large ice chunks littered the ground as a crew on Friday afternoon chipped away at the three-storey icicle on an Avenue W apartment building.
By late afternoon the giant ice column — which gained Canadian and U.S. media attention this week and even had its own parody Twitter account — was half its former height.
“I’m saying this thing has got to be at least three, four thousand pounds,” said Erik Foster, one of two men hired to dismantle the icicle. Foster had to replace the blades of his chainsaw several times as he sawed away at the thick ice.
The property owner hired Foster and another man to demolish the ice after Saskatoon Fire and Protective Services issued an order Thursday to remove the icicle within 24 hours. On Friday morning, crews attempted the task, but the equipment they brought was not sufficient. Foster and another worker returned to the building later in the day armed with chainsaws and sledgehammers, slowly knocking the icicle down.
“I had a big sigh of relief. I will be able to sleep tonight,” said Lisa Tootoosis, who lives in the adjacent apartment and watched the progress of the work.
Tootoosis, who was afraid the icicle would crash into her apartment, was at the centre a media blitz, which gained attention after a story in was published in The StarPhoenix earlier this week, making CBS and NBC newscasts in the United States.
Water dripping from the roof of an apartment building, which is a few metres away from Tootoosis’s building, froze to the side of the wall all winter and the icicle grew to its present size. With relatively warm days in recent weeks, the icicle began to move away from the wall, Tootoosis said.
Foster said the operation to remove the icicle cost the building owner “thousands of dollars.”
“Preventative maintenance could have dealt with all of this. As soon as they saw that leaking like that, they should have called someone. It would have taken us a couple of hours, cost a couple hundred dollars, and it would have been fixed. Now, you are talking some real money,” Foster said.