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Take cover and run

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Walking along Front Street around 10:30 a.m. on Friday, I was briskly instructed by a Intercontinental Hotel on security guard wearing a bright red hard hat to cover my head with my laptop bag and quickly take cover under a canopy as large chunks of ice were reportedly falling from the CN tower.

He chased after me when I didn’t take him seriously, dismissing him as a potential hidden camera show host. “You think I’m joking,” he repeatedly said with bulging eyes.

I looked around and could not find the so-called pieces of ice on the ground, nor could I see the alleged cars with smashed windshields. And not a police car or any form of emergency service in sight.

If a piece of ice was to fly off the CN Tower and head in my direction, I’ve got a hunch the velocity of the ice would both crush me and my ’emergency canvas shelter’.

photo by Miles Storey

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15 comments

  1. Haha! Although I hear the notion of dangerous objects falling from tall buildings is a myth. Apparently they are not that much more dangerous than objects falling off… short buildings.

  2. I was walking in the courtyard of Commerce Court this morning and it was like a hail storm from the ice falling off the buildings.

  3. I heard that if you drop a penny off the Empire State Building it will make a hole in the pavement the size of a Volkswagen!

  4. A person I work with said that he was sitting in a meeting when they all watched a large sheet of ice fall on to the roof of the Skywalk.

    Then when I went out for lunch I was greeted by a slew of police officers who had taped off Front from Simcoe to John, as well as Station St. And, of course, all the news stations had cameras pointed at random places in hopes of catching the EXCLUSIVE footage of what happens when water freezes and wind blows.

  5. I was just there. Front street is closed off by police — the eastern boundary is Simcoe St. The thing is, some of the ice is landing well beyond Simcoe St. (Typical pieces are about a foot or two square.) I saw a couple of officers notice this and assume that awkward “I don’t want to be the proactive one” vibe.

  6. I thought the CN Tower had a heating system built into the “doughnut” to melt the ice and prevent the formation of icicles.

  8. The police officer I was chatting with mentioned a heating system. He said that the last time this happened (two or three years ago apparently), it was because the heating system was broken, but today he wasn’t sure why it was happening.

  9. In response to the original post: I think that covering your head with something would probably do a lot of good, because these things aren’t travelling anywhere near “crater the size of a volkswagen” speed.

    If I may conjecture some physics: the pieces of ice that are travelling far horizontally are necessarily more “sheets” of ice than chunks, because the wind resistance that carries a chunk horizontally is the same wind resistance that slows its descent. So the dangerous, fast-falling chunks would all land near the base of the tower, and the only ones that make it as far as the Joe Badali’s building (like one I saw) are the ones that fall like maple keys.

    Not that this is very comforting. I’m guessing that someone could still be hospitalized or even killed by one if it hit them in the head wrong. But, based on what I saw, you definitely wouldn’t be “crushed”.

  11. There are ways of talking about falling ice without sounding like the sky is actually falling. The CBC didn’t do that this time.

  12. I don’t think the concern was that ice falling from the CN Tower would reach bullet-like speeds, but there is no way to predict where something falling from that height would land.

    Falling ice can be deadly no matter how high it’s falling from, but at least with shorter buildings it’s going to drop pretty much in the same area where it fell off the building.

  14. I saw this in April, 2005 (when I took the photo above) and the pieces had a definite ‘flutter’ to them as they fell. Some of the larger ones, about the size of doors, still made a solid impact on the pavement (ice smash good) near where we were roped off by the cops at Bremner and Rees.

    Back then no significant sized pieces were drifting as far as the Gardiner, I guess the wind was up this time. I remembering talking to a maintenance guy at the scene who told me it happened every year. Perhaps he was just a passer by playing up to my gullible English guy act.

  15. I think that picture is great, but shouldn’t they have a de-icing system on top of the tower to prevent this sort of thing from happening?

    Oh your ’emergency canvas shelter’ is kinda pricy. I’d go for the cheaper version. The umbrella.