Another Ice Surge Attacks Homes on Lake Huron

UPDATE: Here is video of the cleanup yesterday, you can see a guy sweeping ice out of what was formerly his living room window. Crazy stuff!

If you were watching the Raw Video feed on the right hand side of my blog this morning (and I know you were!) you would have seen this incredible video of another "Ice Surge" (like the one I talked about last year) in Linwood, MI yesterday:

As you can see, Linwood is sitting in the craw of Saginaw Bay, making it a unique spot for this type of occurrence, a "slosh" of the water, similar to a Storm Surge, but technically a Seiche [WikiPedia].

Unfortunately there isn't a weather station there to show you the dramatic rise and fall that the water experienced during last year's event. A nearby station at Essexville did show a rise of about 20 inches above normal, and while that might have been enough to pile up ice onto people's houses, I'd bet the levels were even higher at Linwood. The water moves the level of the ice up, then waves on top of that break the ice and pile it up as you see in the video above.

You can certainly see the high winds the night before the surge on the graph from the Saginaw Lighthouse. Not surprisingly, the wind was from 45 degrees (Northeast) during that time.

In my opinion, 48-mph winds could easily shove enough to water into the bay to cause the destruction seen in the video above. Indeed, wind maps from that night showed a wide, strong area of high winds from the Northeast over Lake Huron.