Lake Erie Storm Surge Ice Attacks Houses!

The hurricane-force wind gusts* I mentioned yesterday blowing across Lake Erie forced an icy storm surge up to 10 feet high (NewsNet5). In some cases, huge chunks of ice crashed through shore-front homes. This story says "The ice-filled lake waters... rose an astonishing 8 feet during the height of the windstorm" and Channel 4 has awesome video and the story

of a harrowing tale:

Can you imagine? The Channel 4 article defines the occurence as not technically a storm surge, but rather a seiche [WikiPedia], and says it was the worst since 1985 - and the second largest ever - certainly the worst ever with ice! The NOAA Great Lakes website shows the dramatic 9-foot rise and fall of the water at the Buffalo gauge (see also Sturgeon Point), along with impressive temperature, wind and pressure readings as the storm moved through:

If you look at the graph, this happened over a period of less than two hours, so it was very sudden. And of course, at the other end of the lake, the Toledo gauge showed the water level dropping 10 feet!

Roads in Buffalo were also flooded by the water and ice, and the roof of a historic structure collapsed. See below for a video from WIVB (check out the "lake-cicles" on the van!).

NOTE: THE VIDEO ABOVE MAY BE PRECEDED BY ADVERTISEMENTS

VIDEO CAPTION: A severe winter storm blasted western New York today, leaving damage and flood streets across the area (Wed, 1/30). The cold front knocked out power to more than 80-thousand customers in upstate New York. Most of those outages affected homes and businesses in a large section of western New York. Sixty-mile-per-hour winds created dangerous conditions for area residents.

Thanks much to blog reader George for the tip on this news story.

*Saying "gusting over hurricane force" is a bit misleading, since hurricane force is determined by sustained winds. But it's ubiquity as a term causes me to allow it.

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