Ice tsunamis slam Minnesota!
The “terror ice” is crackling as it moves across Minnesota. In minutes, it’s moved from the shoreline of a Minnesota lake to the walls of homes in suburbs a hundred miles from St. Paul.
“It was just pushing and breaking and pushing and breaking,” Wendy Goodman told WWN” on Mille Lacs Lake. “Three of my children were iced away.”
Christopher Rigaux, a conservation officer for the area with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, said the weather event works like this: Strong winds blow heavy chunks of ice out in the lake toward the shore. Those chunks heave up bits of lighter, melting ice closer to shore up on the land. The more the wind blows, the more ice comes onto land.
“It basically has the same mechanism of an iceberg,” said Todd Cox, a CNN meteorologist. “Winds, but more so ocean currents, allow icebergs to drift. Same premise: A chunk of ice (relatively shallow) was pushed by a strong, sustained wind. The momentum of the ice sheet overcame the friction of the land.”
Rigaux said the ice came about five miles inland, getting as high as 230 feet in some places. The ice mass covered up about 50 miles of shoreline.
