EARTHQUAKE!!!!

The house is shaking!  It's an earthquake!  Is it?  Or did someone hit the house with a car?????  No, can't be.  It is coming from the back I think. Running.  Oh God, the ice came down.

How could these pretty things cause so much havoc in a few seconds.

Lucas was terrified, my heart was beating a million beats a minute.  It really seemed like an earthquake, the whole house was shaking for about 30 seconds or more.  And it was so loud.  We realized later that all the sound was the ice coming free and hitting the ground, then all the nails holding up the eavestrough being pulled out one after the other along the back of the house. When I walked to the back of the house all I could see out the door was the eavestrough hanging in front of it.  The ice dam that was up on the second story had come loose this afternoon and took the whole eavestrough with it, and hit the siding and our back door and the other eavestrough on it's way down.  The door screen broke and the door jam is all cracked.  We have no idea how the giant ice cube didn't go through the wall or the roof.  We are guessing that it swung down still attached to the eavestrough and came loose when it was swinging. 

We estimate the sucker weighs 1000-2000 pounds.  It is over 5 feet long.  It is simply massive.  It landed on the back step, we don't know if the step survived.  I was just happy that my new exterior light somehow got missed and luckily so did the siding on our new addition.

 

We had had the lower flat roof shoveled off after the storms, but at the top there was nothing we could do.  We have been watching the ice dam get bigger and bigger.  I stopped letting the dog out the back a week ago, now I know I wasn't just paranoid about an ice meterorite coming down on our patio.

You can see all the eavestroughing gone off the second story.

Jason and I went out and took off this ice dam today.  It is at the other end but has the flat roof below it so we could stand on it while we hacked away at it.  We didn't want the whole thing coming down into Sophie's bedroom.  We got most of it off and the last piece that fell was about 300 pounds.  We were able to roll it over away from the siding after it came down, but couldn't move it any farther.  Not my idea of a fun afternoon.