Ice is forming almost as fast as Coast Guard icebreakers can cut through it and without them the Detroit River could freeze over completely, harkening back to the days when rumrunners drove cargoes of illegal booze across the frozen river.
“We are having basically our worst ice season in probably decades,” Lieut. Chad Yeamans, who helps oversee icebreaking operations with the U.S. Coast Guard in Detroit, said Tuesday.
The icebreaking season started a few weeks early and the extreme cold – it was -25 C early Tuesday and is expected to be -8 Wednesday — is making the coast guard’s work much more difficult.
“When it’s this cold we’re basically an ice machine. It re-freezes as soon as we break it, almost,” Yeamans said.
Yeamans said much of the Detroit River has a layer of ice that is one to four inches and it’s thicker on Lake St. Clair, with four to six inches of ice and as much as 10 to 14 inches in the St. Clair River.
Satellite images show the shallow Lake St. Clair and the western basin of Lake Erie mostly frozen over.
The U.S. Coast Guard, which works with the Canadian Coast Guard, has to keep ships moving in the winter in what’s dubbed Operation Coal Shovel because many freighters are carrying coal to power plants in Michigan and to avoid an ice dam which could cause flooding, Yeamans said.
Two U.S. Coast Guard icebreaking tugs called the Morro Bay and the Neah Bay are working with the Canadian Coast Guard vessels Samuel Risley and the Griffon.
The Griffon was working on Lake Erie Tuesday but the others were together on a convoy breaking through the ice so freighters – four of them led Tuesday by the icebreaker Samuel Risley — can get to Sarnia and then the following day the convoy moves toward the Detroit River and Lake Erie. Four ships were waiting in Sarnia Tuesday.
“Right now the ice conditions are so bad in the lower part of the St. Clair River and the northern part of Lake St. Clair that it’s very, very difficult for any vessel traffic, any ship traffic to get through there,” Yeamans said.
Photos from the Detroit News archives show cars on the Detroit River during prohibition when there were sometimes caravans on the ice of rumrunners in cars.
There are also stories of people driving, snowmobiling and skating on Lake Erie to get to Pelee Island, including tales of attempts that ended tragically when cars plunged through the ice.
Former Pelee Island Mayor Bill Krestel, 67, remembers his first and last Lake Erie ice crossing by car as a teenager in 1962 or 1963 when he rode with his father, his sister and some caskets for the funeral home in his dad’s pickup truck.
He was going to school in Leamington and his father gave him a ride back to Pelee Island in a convoy over the frozen lake. The group didn’t go back on the ice again and he had to fly back to the mainland.
“There were a couple of cracks out there but they just put planks down and drove across the crack and that was all there was to it,” Krestel recalled Tuesday of an old truck his father was willing to risk losing in the ice.
Krestel said the crossings by car ended as ice breaking on the lakes for shipping grew. He remembers a Leamington man said he had skated to Pelee Island and back on the ice when he was younger and it was common in the 1980s to use snowmobiles to get from Pelee Island to nearby American spots — North Bass and Middle Bass islands and Put-in-Bay — for lunch or a drink.
Eric Anderson, a research scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory in Ann Arbor, Mich., said the Detroit River and Lake St. Clair could freeze over completely given the right conditions. Lake St. Clair and the western basin of Lake Erie are mostly frozen over, although that layer of ice usually continues to move very slowly.
Anderson said the western end of Lake Erie south of Essex County has a thin layer of ice that is about 10 to 15 centimeters thick and it gets thicker east of Point Pelee. Most of the Great Lakes is open water with ice near the shore including the eastern end of Lake Erie.
The Great Lakes has gone from very little ice cover during the 2011 – 2012 winter to what scientists predict will be 57 per cent to 62 per cent maximum ice coverage over the Great Lakes by February which would be over the long term average.
The lowest ice coverage on record since 1973 for the Great Lakes was in 2002 when there was 9.5 per cent ice coverage.
The highest maximum ice coverage on the Great Lakes which is calculated using satellite images was 94.7 per cent in 1979.
