ALLAGASH – People in the village talked Friday about the St. John River ice jam on their doorstep, but the almost 3-mile-long jam doesn’t seem to be the cause of many problems, at least not now.

The ice jam hasn’t moved in 48 hours, since Wednesday afternoon. Water can be seen through cracks in the ice floes and seems to be moving. The water level is high.

The jam starts below the Dickey Trading Post and is backed up west from there to the Big Rapids. Ice floes more than 2 feet thick were sticking up 6 to 8 feet in the air Friday morning.

Low-lying areas along the banks of the St. John River, above the bridge at Dickey, were filling up with water and smaller chunks of ice.

“We’ve sent a spotter, but he has not yet returned,” Larry Gabric, meteorologist in charge at the National Weather Service Office in Caribou, said Friday afternoon. “From what we’ve heard, and from river depth readings, the jam seems to have stabilized and is not causing any significant problems.”

He said water rose at a gauging station at Dickey through Thursday afternoon, but had since gone down a bit.

Tylor Kelly is not so sure that problems may not be in the offing.

“There are places just ahead of the ice jam where there is 3 feet or more of ice,” he said Friday morning. “The ice in the dead water just below the trading post builds up all winter.

“Even if there is open water 1 mile down river, the ice is thick between the ice jam and the open water,” he said. “A lot of this looks like 1991.”

Kelly was referring to the huge ice jam in 1991 that tore two bridges from their moorings and dumped them into the river. Huge sections of Route 161 were cut away and dumped into the river, and several homes were destroyed.

Kelly still remembers the long night he spent in the spring of 1991 ferrying people by canoe through ice floes. Residents of the area were caught behind a large flooded area. Travel by road was impossible.

While the existing ice jam isn’t an immediate problem, it could be if large amounts of ice from upriver come down at one time and crash into the jammed section.

Below the Dickey Trading Post, a local general store and restaurant, there is open water. Some areas have open courses of water 25 to 50 feet wide, but some areas are still covered with ice.

There are some breaks in the ice along the Allagash River as well. Pelletier Brook, a major tributary down river from the village, also is opening up from its winter ice cover.

Between Allagash and Fort Kent, some 30 miles by Route 161, however, there still are miles of river where the ice seems untouched under its covering of snow.