The Weight Of Ice

An ice storm made history in New England in February, 1898, when the formation of ice was so astonishing that a plaster cast was taken of one of the ice-encased wires of the New England Telephone and Telegraph Company, and is now exhibited in the Bell Historical Museum, in New York. The wire, with its’ coating of ice, weighed 3.2 pounds to the linear foot. In its general effects this storm was, however, eclipsed by the one of November 27-29, 1921. The area affected in this case amounted to about 3,600 square miles, with the focus of destruction in east-central Massachusetts.

North of this area there, was a heavy fall of snow, while to the southward rain fell without freezing. The ice storm was accompanied by fairly high winds, and the rain continued steadily for more than seventy hours. Ice began forming on Sunday, the 27th. By the following morning it had reached the danger point, and for two days its ravages grew more and more spectacular. Great limbs were torn from thousands of trees and crashed to the ground. In the woods the fall of the iceladen branches and the collapse of heavy boughs was so incessant that the mingled sounds had the effect of a continuous roar. More than 100,000 trees were wrecked beyond recovery by this storm, and it is said that a century from now the effects of the catastrophe upon the woodlands of New England will be plainly discernible to the critical observer of tree habits.

Streets became impassable and dangerous. Four or five persons were killed and several injured by falling branches, poles, signs and roofs. Schools were closed, electric lights were extinguished, and the life of the community, deprived of telephone, telegraph and trolley car service, slowed down almost to a standstill. Every householder who has dealings with the iceman knows that frozen water is heavy stuff. It weighs about fifty-six pounds to the cubic foot. Several determinations were made of the weight of ice accumulated on branches and wires in the New England storm. The weight of a branch was increased in some cases more than thirty-fold by its ice coating. It was estimated that a tree fifty feet high and of an average width of twenty feet carried a load of five tons of ice.

In one case an iron guy wire, with its sheath of ice, was found to weigh six pounds to the foot. Just west of Worcester, where the poles carrying the New York, Springfield and Pittsfield telephone toll lines have eight cross-arms with ten wires to an arm, the average weight of the ice-clad wires was one pound to the foot. As the distance between poles averaged 110 feet, this means that each span carried a burden of 8,800 pounds, or more than four tons.

By: davidbunch

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