ROBINSON TOWNSHIP, Mich. — Shards of ice barreled through Tate Tracey’s backyard in Robinson Township on Sunday.
“All of a sudden [there was a] boom, crash, and all of this,” said Tracey. “I never thought I’d go to lunch, albeit a late lunch, and have this here.”
The afternoon surprise was caused by an ice jam on the Grand River near the M-231 bridge that briefly broke free before it came to a halt roughly 300 yards west of its original spot.
“We’re certainly monitoring it,” said Lou Hunt, Ottawa County’s director of emergency management. “[There] was a fluctuation on two of our river gauges that aren’t too far from each other. It didn’t make a lot of sense with the normal flow of the river that this one would be going down and this one would be going up.”
According to Hunt, ice started to clump on Saturday and quickly blocked the flow over the river.
On Sunday, before the ice jam broke, water flooded Van Lopik Avenue and Limberlost Lane. Officials have advised approximately 30 homes in the area to leave.
A flood warning has been issued through Monday night.
“The length of this one is pretty impressive,” said Hunt. “It’s significantly long. There’s a lot of ice there and it’s really hampered by the problem that we have an almost continuous ice sheet from basically M-231 to almost downtown Grand Haven near the municipal marina.”
Water levels in the two affected neighborhoods eventually receded after the ice jam broke, but Hunt calls the phenomenon “unpredictable” and says people should expect fluctuations in the river’s levels as the ice jam heads downstream.
Hunt says there’s little the department can do besides monitor the ice jam. He asks people who live in low-lying areas to create emergency plans.
“An ice jam, by definition, is holding back the water and the water has to find somewhere to go,” said Hunt. “It either rises or it finds its way through and around.”
