Big show out by Algonac Yesterday
The St. Clair River was plugged up with flow ice, and a tug/barge combo (tug slotted permanently into the back of a barge) was stuck. The U.S. Coast Guard had two ice breaking tugs there and a chopper overhead directing operations, and the Canadian Coast Guard had one of their icebreakers (much larger than the U.S. tugs) there. Took a while, but when everything opened up, it looked like the ice was flowing at about five or six knots. Like a dam breaking. Fun to watch. The coast guard boats would be sitting still, then pour on the power and within yards they were at full speed going through the ice. Then they would stop, and do the same backing up.
Beautiful, bright and clear sunny day, in the high 50’s maybe 60. Dozens of people there to watch. One of the guys I talked to had driven over from Birch Run, about a hundred miles from Algonac, just to see the show. It was so strange to be so warm, the grass is all greening up, guys in T-shirts, and the river was full of ice.
This flow ice is not solid, just all floating chunks, but it jams up in narrow sections of the river and stops everything. The water downstream drops several feet and upstream sometimes floods. This is about the fourth time in the last few weeks that the Coast Guards have been out there to open things up. The strange thing is that there is no ice on the big lakes, and there wasn’t really much ice anywhere on the lakes this past winter.
Beautiful, bright and clear sunny day, in the high 50’s maybe 60. Dozens of people there to watch. One of the guys I talked to had driven over from Birch Run, about a hundred miles from Algonac, just to see the show. It was so strange to be so warm, the grass is all greening up, guys in T-shirts, and the river was full of ice.
This flow ice is not solid, just all floating chunks, but it jams up in narrow sections of the river and stops everything. The water downstream drops several feet and upstream sometimes floods. This is about the fourth time in the last few weeks that the Coast Guards have been out there to open things up. The strange thing is that there is no ice on the big lakes, and there wasn’t really much ice anywhere on the lakes this past winter.
The guy from Birch Run commented that it looked like our ‘Stimulus Money’ at work, “spending our tax money”. I told him icebreaking had nothing to do with the 'Stimulus', that the U.S. Coast Guard is required by law to keep the shipping lanes open.
The most famous U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker on the lakes is the Mackinaw, retired June, 2006 after 62 years of service, built during WWII to keep the lakes open for shipping iron ore to the steel mills.
USCG Cutter Mackinaw
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