[meteorite-list] Large Ice Slab Lands in Oakland, California

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Mon Apr 10 10:32:23 2006
Message-ID: <200604100442.k3A4deD21284_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://www.insidebayarea.com/timesstar/localnews/ci_3691061

Large ice slab drops on Oakland

Frozen two-foot chunk from the sky digs three-foot hole in Bushrod Park

By William Brand and Ian Hoffman
Inside Bay Area
April 9, 2006

OAKLAND - Did it come from outer space? Was it a transport vehicle for
illegal aliens of the extraterrestrial kind? The tail of a comet grabbed
by gravity?

Jokes were flying Saturday morning after a block of solid ice, measuring
more than two feet on a side, crashed to earth with a tremendous bang,
digging a three-foot hole in the grass at Bushrod Park, 5800 Shattuck Ave.

But when the laughing stopped, an expert theorized it probably fell from
the wheel well of a plane landing at Oakland or San Francisco
International airports. It also could be an unexplained "ice fall," one
expert said. Big balls of ice sometimes fall from the sky without any
real explanation.

Wherever it came from, it's arrival was heart-stopping and dramatic.

Brooks and Judith Mencher said they were standing on their back porch on
59th Street near the park when they heard a sound like a very loud
rocket. "It kind of went 'whoosh!'" Brooks Mencher said.

The impact hole looked like it was created by a hand grenade, said
Oakland Police Sgt. Ron Lighten. "It knocked turf 20 feet away."

Lt. Charles Glass of the Oakland Fire Hazardous Materials Team said the
ice was pure water. " It didn't come from a toilet on a plane or
anything like that."

Glass said the ice that firefighters pulled from the hole was about the
size of the hole, three by three feet and two and a half feet deep. It
also broke a ceramic irrigation pipe at the bottom of the hole.

At Oakland International, a spokeswoman said she had no idea if a plane
might have been going overhead at that moment. "We'll have to wait until
Monday, when that information is available," she said.

Web sites that track commercial flights show a spike in arrivals at
Oakland International at about the time, 10:05 a.m., that the ice ball
put a hole in Bushrod Park. Two runway approaches for San Francisco
International also go almost directly overhead.

An operations manager at the Federal Aviation Administration in Los
Angeles said he had never heard of such a thing.

"I've been here 15 years and what usually falls from planes is 'blue
ice,' that's methylene glycol. They put it in airplane toilets.
Sometimes there are leaks and it falls out," he said.

But Tony Hirsch, a Columbus, Ohio-based aviation expert, said ice falls
of pure water are not uncommon: "Ice builds up on airplanes and falls
off as they prepare to land."

But Hirsch said the airplane "would have to descend through what we call
visible moisture, rain or clouds, for ice to build up." The skies were
partly cloudy Saturday morning.

Hirsch said a large chunk of ice could build up on the vertical
stabilizer or in a wheel well: "When they lower their landing gear, it
falls off."

As bad as Bay Area weather has been, the National Weather Service said
none of the storms has been violent enough to hatch a gigantic hailstone
on its own. "There's nothing meteorological that would create a piece
that big falling into Oakland," said weather service forecaster Diana
Henderson.

Electrical engineer Richard Spalding thinks there must be another
explanation. He tracks meteors as part of work on satellite instruments
and became interested in balls of ice that smash down from time to time.

"Ice falls do happen fairly frequently," Spalding said. "Just about
every year, there's a news item somewhere. I think it came from a
natural process that we're ignorant of, where it can form at altitude
and fall as a chunk," he said.

There's at least one recorded incident of ice from a plane hitting a
house. It happened in 2004 in Kent, near Seattle. Homeowner Troy Halte
said Saturday a chunk of ice made a basketball size hole in his roof and
the ice landed in softball-size pieces on this daughter's bed.

"Fortunately, nobody was home," he said.
Received on Mon 10 Apr 2006 12:39:40 AM PDT