Ice torrent sparks Cambridge havoc
Cascade of slush and water explodes out of two rivers, rips water main, cuts off service to half the city
CAMBRIDGE — A dead fish lay in the middle of Highway 24.
Beyond it, huge chunks of ice piled up and spread out across a section of Water Street South on the southern tip of Cambridge.
“It’s amazing,” Cambridge mayor Doug Craig said of Wednesday’s surreal scene. “I’ve never seen ice that thick before.”
The luminous slabs, some more than a foot deep and stacked like coffee-table coasters, were flung over the banks of the Grand River, between Ainslie Street and Myers Road, in the middle of the night.
A stubborn upstream jam of sturdy blue ice — the biggest such jam the Grand River Conservation Authority has seen in this reach of the Grand in 40 years — had finally been eroded by steady rain, running water and sudden February warmth.
Just before two in the morning, the ice jam collapsed and its destructive shards gushed over the Park Hill Road dam in Galt.
Weeks of backed-up slush and water from the Grand and Speed rivers briefly poured forward at 1,100 cubic metres per second — about 200 cubic metres stronger than the flow that caused flooding in that stretch last June.
The surge’s icy claws, carrying branches and logs, tore a 25-foot section of water main from the underbelly of the Concession Street bridge, knocking out water service to half the city for a few hours.
Further downstream, the crest flung ice chunks into trees and bent walkway railings on the east side of the river before heading toward Brantford.
The water-propelled pulse of heavy ice pushed wooden guard posts out of the ground at the river’s side of Water Street South.
The metal wire that hung the posts together wowed out across the road like an archer’s bowstring. Icy mayhem on one side. Clear road on the other.
Cleanup crews feared the tension remaining in the wire.
At least the wave of ice stopped before the pumps of a Petro Canada station facing away from the river. That was a fortunate break.
“It just all seemed to stop right here at the gas station,” said Ganice Thomson, a longtime Cambridge resident who lives nearby.
“Could you imagine if all this had hit the gas station and what an explosion that would have caused? If it can’t stop at barbed wire up there, could you imagine if it had pushed over the gas tanks here and what damaged that would have created?”
Thomson marvelled at the irony of the billboard sign advertising for baked goods, right beside the gas station. “Frozen never tasted so fresh,” it read.
“We’ve gotten through it,” Craig said on Wednesday afternoon.
“We had some difficulty, obviously. No one was hurt. And we managed to restore the water to about half the city in about four hours, which I thought was great.”
Deputy city manager Hardy Bromberg said his phone rang just before 3 a.m. on Wednesday. Deputy fire chief Brian Arnold had some grim news.
The troublesome ice jam, which had caused flooding along Blair Road, had finally dispersed. But it had heaved ice on the Concession Street bridge. The bridge needed to be closed. And, as a topper, Galt was suddenly without water. A portion of Preston was too.
“Are we talking a couple of streets? Don’t know,” Bromberg said at the time. “What scope, was unknown.”
Bromberg called for city officials from various departments to set up an emergency operations centre. By 3:30, Craig was on hand to observe and ask questions. The GRCA called in to provide technical updates. City staff took to social media to update residents as callers overloaded Cambridge’s after-hours service line.
Meanwhile, another troubling issue had emerged.
Cambridge Memorial Hospital reported it had no water. City officials went to investigate. The problem was determined to be off-site. But the hospital, which has a water supply reserve that lasts about 90 minutes, was anxious to bring the water service back online.
The source of the city’s water problem was quickly identified.
The ice, and most likely a tree branch, had left a wide gash in the water pipes under the Concession bridge. The valves were closed off and the water supply rerouted to restore service to the entire city.
“We figure we lost about $200,000 worth of water,” Bromberg said.
By 5 a.m., the hospital’s water service was restored and the “Code Grey” which began around 1:30 a.m., ended after only a few hours.
“Fortunately, it came at a time most of our patients are asleep,” hospital spokesperson Stephan Beckhoff said on Wednesday afternoon.
“The activity was quite low so I don’t think it had much of an impact other than the brown water we’re experiencing right now.”
The brown water, Bromberg said, remained safe for residents experiencing the same issue on Wednesday.
It had to do with stirred-up sediment and could be generally solved by running taps in a pencil-thin rate for about 15 minutes.
The Concession bridge, which the region had checked by structural engineers on Wednesday, was deemed stable and opened by noon. Bromberg said it was too early to guesstimate the cost of the cleanup or the amount of total damage caused by ice and water on Wednesday.
“The water main won’t be repaired probably for a couple of weeks,” Bromberg said. “Our system is functioning without it.”
Overall, Craig was pleased with how the crisis was handled by city staff.
“It all went very smoothly,” he said.
On Tuesday night, GRCA director of engineering Dwight Boyd briefed city council on the ice jam’s potential to create more local flooding in the Blair Road, south-of-King-Street Preston and Blackbridge Road areas. Boyd told council the peak period of ice coming though the city was expected to arrive early Wednesday. That’s exactly what happened.
“They’re huge,” West Galt resident Adam Cunningham said of the ice chunks on the banks of the Grand above the Park Hill Dam on Wednesday. “The power of them is crazy.”
The GRCA maintained flood warnings for the area watershed in the wake of the ice jam collapse. The stubborn jam that had plugged up the Grand from the Park Hill Dam north to the railway bridge created the potential for destructive flooding and ice movement.
“If the ice wasn’t in the river, there really wouldn’t be a concern with the flows that we have,” Boyd told council.
Wendy Wassink watched the water rush madly over the Park Hill Dam on Wednesday. The motionless sea of ice she saw a day earlier was gone.
“It was calm the day before,” she said. “Nothing wild, like this.”