Homes along the shore of Lake Erie in New York are completely covered in ice thanks to last week’s blizzard-like conditions.
“After temperatures dipped below freezing on Wednesday, days of persistent strong winds and heavy waves blew the water from Lake Erie ashore, encasing several homes in Hamburg, New York in ice,” according to Fox News.
Saturday, photographer John Kucko tweeted haunting images of the structures that looked like something from a children’s book:
Resident Ed Mis said although he has lived in the area for the past eight years, he had never seen ice this bad until now.
“It looks fake, it looks unreal,” he commented, adding, “It’s dark on the inside of my house. It can be a little eerie, a little frightening.”
Weather expert Tom Niziol explained that it was a case of when everything wrong happens at once.
He stated:
Talk about weather catastrophes where everything comes together at the wrong place and wrong time and this essentially was it. You’re sitting at the east end of a 225-mile stretch of water. Winds were gusting over 40 miles an hour for about a 48 hour period straight and they peaked at over 60 miles an hour along that shoreline.
Lake Erie typically has significant ice cover by this time of the year, and that protects the shoreline from these battering storms. But right now, the lake has no ice cover at all on its eastern end.
Saturday, Meteorologist Mike Doyle tweeted several photos of the frozen structures in and around Hamburg:
Monday, Mis said he was just concerned about the structural damage the ice could cause to his home.
“We’re worried about the integrity, of structure failure when it starts to melt, because of the weight on the roof,” he told reporters, adding, “It’s a beautiful sight, but I don’t want to live through it again.”