Local and federal officials don’t know what may have caused a missile-like shaft of ice 6 feet long to tear through the metal roof of a Seminole Woods house in Palm Coast Monday afternoon on a warm, cloudless day. But they have ideas.
No one was hurt when the ice bombed the house moments before 3:39 p.m., when a neighbor reported it to Flagler County’s 911 dispatch center. The neighbor told the dispatcher that the ice went right through the roof, while there was ice “all over the roadway as well.” When firefighters arrived, chunks of ice that had fallen in the driveway had melted, leaving small circular patches of moisture.
Within eight minutes Flagler County FireFlight, the emergency helicopter, was doing a fly-over while the county’s building inspector was dispatched on the ground. The Palm Coast Fire Department’s Engine 29 responded and was able to get most of the ice out of the hole before it melted, which would have piled water damage on top of the roof damage.
“Some of it was still sticking out,” Palm Coast Fire Chief Kyle Berryhill said of the ice, when firefighters first arrived on scene. He estimated the shard that struck the roof was 6 feet long. The city’s paramedics also assisted in installing a tarp over the roof. Berryhill would not speculate about the cause. “That’s not really our role in the Fire Department, figuring out why,” he said. “We’re there to respond to things that are happening. That’s why we emphasize response time.”
But he said he’d never experienced that sort of incident in 20-some years, and said it would have been “catastrophic” had it struck an occupied car or a person.
Flagler County Emergency Management Director Jonathan Lord has experienced something similar over 20 years ago in South Florida, when it was determined that the ice was so-called “blue ice,” or the treated effluent from commercial planes. In this case, Lord said that based on the photographs the Palm Coast Fire Department took of the ice, it did not appear to be the biological kind.
Lord echoed the assessment of federal officials, saying water that sometimes leaks out of a commercial plane forms ice on its fuselage. As the plane descends into warmer air, the ice can melt and fall off. When the FAA gets such reports, as it does from time to time–there was a nearly identical incident in Patterson, N.J., seven months ago, when the homeowners were on their porch–the agency tries to determine whether the ice could have come from an aircraft and then identify aircraft potentially involved.
“The FAA is investigating,” a spokesperson at the agency’s Atlanta office said today.
“It’s not common in any way shape or form, but it’s also not unheard of,” Lord said. “It’s definitely horrible for the family who own that home. They have a repair to do now and I’m sure they’ll have to chat with their insurance company.”
In the Patterson incident, the homeowners were sitting on their porch when they heard what they described to a television reporter as the quick whirring of helicopter blades before the crashing down. They went inside and discovered that the ice had torn through the roof, the attic, and damaged a ceiling.
Pam Coast sits below a sky highway, with traffic in and out of Orlando arcing over the city, and traffic to and from south Florida and Latin America also crisscrossing the sky at most hours.
The building inspector cleared for occupancy the 2,500-square foot house on Seattle Trail, which was built in 2006. The house has been under the ownership of the same resident for 20 years. She is now 73. She was not home at the time of the incident, but made contact with authorities there before sundown. A check through Palm Coast permitting records indicates no roof work for at least 20 years. Metal roofs are durable, but cannot withstand the impact of a shard of ice hurling from the sky at rocket speed.
