The Great Ice Battle

The region around St. Louis suffered the maximum effects of the Great December storm of the early 1920s. Trains were forced to stop running because there were no signals to guide them and the tracks were littered with ice-covered debris. More than 5,000 passengers were stranded in the St. Louis Union Station for forty-eight hours. The telephone companies had an especially serious problem on their hands in this case, because the storm-stricken belt lay straight across the transcontinental system of communications, which was, momentarily, severed during the disaster. Telephonically, coast was cut off from coast as completely as in the days when the highways of speech had not yet scaled the Rockies.

The night-and-day struggle that the repairmen waged with that inundation of ice through weeks of bitterly cold weather is still referred to by telephone men as "the Great Ice Battle of 1924-25." The public little realizes the arduous tasks that are performed on such occasions—by the linemen in the field–by the men who solve Chinese puzzles at the test lards in rerouting the broken circuits—by the clerical employees, both men and women, who lend a hand wherever needed. The wire-using industries are accustomed to these battles with ice and have developed standardized methods and a highly mobile organization of their repair forces for coping with each situation as it arises.

The Bell System and its associated companies maintain thirty-one large supply warehouses in different parts of the country, from which materials for repairing damages can be shipped promptly into a storm area. A fleet of motor trucks is available to supplement crippled railroads. The cost of these affrays, which mounts up into the millions each winter, is met from a special reserve fund, accumulated through the year and charged monthly to operating expenses. The ruin of wires and poles by clinging ice is a relatively novel form of calamity, since the property affected is a development of modern industry.

With the progress of invention such damage will be diminished and perhaps eliminated. Already radio and underground cables provide channels of communication that are invulnerable to the assaults of ice. Electric power companies know how to melt ice from their wires by sending heating currents through them. The electric railways remove ice from trolley wires by means of a special type of trolley wheel provided with a cutting edge. One railway keeps its "third rail" free by spraying it with a solution of calcium chloride. The plight of the trees is—alas!—perennial and apparently incurable. They are at the mercy of the elements.

By: davidbunch

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