[Rhodes22-list] Major Ice Damage

[Jim Connolly]

Roger,

Sorry to hear about your dock, especially at this time when you have so
little time to fix it.  The power of ice is truly awesome.  The weight of
your ice floe was probably more than 100 tons for every inch of thickness,
so it's no wonder that your dock didn't even slow it down.  

I was reminded of something that happened to me a few years ago.  The sub I
was on surfaced through polar ice that turned out to be several feet thicker
than we initially had thought.  A slab several feet thick ended up propped
against the side of the sub's sail that protruded through the ice.  When it
came time to

submerge again, we got hung up with the ice wedged agains welded steel
ladder rungs on the side of the sail.  We had to flood tens of thousands of
pounds negative buoyancy to break free.  When we got back home, we found
that rather than the steel breaking the ice, the ice had sheared the steel
ladder rungs right off the sail.  Our ship (like your dock) had been
designed for this sort of thing.

Good luck with your repairs and keep us posted.

Jim Connolly
s/v Inisheer
'85 recycled '03 





-----Original Message-----
From: rhodes22-list-bounces at rhodes22.org
[mailto:rhodes22-list-bounces at rhodes22.org] On Behalf Of Roger Pihlaja
Sent: Saturday, March 06, 2004 5:48 PM
To: The Rhodes 22 mail list
Subject: [Rhodes22-list] Major Ice Damage

Hi Everybody,

Midland County, MI is under a flood warning due to the warm temperatures &
heavy rains the last couple of days.  Sanford Lake rose about 3 feet in 5
hours today!  My neighbor said he saw the the ice floe that caused the
damage to our docks & boat lifts in the attached photos.  It was about 100
yards X 50 yards & being pushed along by a 4-5 knot current!  He said this
massive ice floe didn't even slow down when it tore thru his pier & boat
lift & my wharf & pier.  The sound accompanying this event was also quite
impressive!  I designed & built this wharf & pier in the summer of 1983,
using ice engineering procedures from the Canadian Journal of Civil
Engineering.  So, it was nearly 21 years old & has never given a bit of
trouble to this point.  The pilings were sunk 4 feet into the mud bottom in
300 lbs of concrete each and the pilings were X-braced with thru-bolted
steel U-channel in both the E-W as well as the N-S directions.

As luck would have it, I happened to take some pictures down by the lake
about 1 month ago on Feb. 7, 2004 because of the unusually heavy snowfall we
had this winter.  I've included these shots as "before" photos & then
included the shots taken today from roughly the same location & angle for
comparison.  If you look closely at the photos taken on 02/07/2004, you will
be able to see some of the X-braced thru-bolted steel reinforcing structure
on the pilings on the piers, because the lake level was very low this
winter.

If you look closely at the "after" photos, you will see the 4 pilings are
still intact on the pier.  These pilings either sheared off at the lake
bottom or perhaps the ice floe pushed them, cement & all thru the bottom to
their present location.  If so, I may have 4 rather large trenches in the
lake bottom!  In any case, when the water warms up, I will have a major
project this spring and summer.  Just clearing away the debris will be a
nontrivial task.

I haven't been able to contact my homeowner's insurance agent, so I don't
know if my homeowner's insurance covers this sort of damage.  We don't have
flood insurance, so my expectation is we don't have any coverage.  But,
we'll see what our agent says.



Figure 1: Stairs & Pier Looking South On 02/07/2004
 


Figure 2: Stairs & Wrecked Pier Looking South On 03/06/2004



Figure 3: Stairs & Pier Looking NE On 02/07/2004



Figure 4: Stairs & Wrecked Pier Looking NE On 03/06/2004



Figure 5: Wrecked Wharf & Wrecked Harper's Pier & Boat Lift Looking North On
03/06/2004



Figure 6: Wrecked Wharf & Pier Looking South From Harper's Stairs On
03/06/2004