Ice jam creates tense ‘waiting game’ State emergency officials fly over St. John River, prepare for worst

ALLAGASH – Milt Tottle is waiting out the ice jam. He has to. The Allagash man has been cut off from the rest of his community since Friday, when floodwaters rose near his home along the St. John River, submerging the only road to town.

“It’s exactly the same as it’s been for the past few days,” Tottle said by phone Sunday, reporting the condition of the nearly 10-mile-long ice jam, which state and local authorities are closely watching. “The ice is still sitting here by my house – and there’s a lot of it.”

Tottle has plenty of food and said his home is on high ground, so he’s not too concerned about getting caught in a dangerous situation. Still, he’s one of hundreds of northern Aroostook County residents who could be in trouble if the ice jam suddenly breaks and releases the rising swell of water behind it to surge toward Fort Kent.

In anticipation of such an event, local and state officials were out this weekend surveying the jam, which stretches from Cross Rock near the Allagash town line back to Big Rapids four miles west of the town.

Gov. John Baldacci and Art Cleaves, director of the Maine Emergency Management Agency, joined other local emergency management officials on Saturday for a helicopter ride along the St. John River, where ice chunks as massive as 30 feet thick reportedly were floating.

“We saw camps and houses flooded out, and we saw some families who were cut off because the roads were flooded,” Baldacci said after the helicopter landed at Northern Aroostook Regional Airport in Frenchville on Saturday.

“We plan to work with emergency management agency people, placing helicopters nearby just in case people get stranded,” the governor said.

Vernon Ouellette, Aroostook County Emergency Management Agency director, said Sunday that his organization is working to reposition a Maine Forest Service helicopter in Ashland and has the local chapter of the American Red Cross on standby.

Ouellette also reported that Nine-Mile Bridge, about 80 miles southwest of Allagash, lost one of its pillars on Friday.

“No one’s sure how that happened, but we assume it was ice going through there,” Ouellette said.

Officials are not sure whether the bridge will collapse but have barricaded it to prevent crossings.

In Allagash, Roy Gardner, director of the Allagash Emergency Management Agency, said the town is as ready as it can be for flooding. Bridges were built higher and most homes were moved out of harm’s way after the last big flood the town experienced.

An ice jam near Allagash in 1991 took down two bridges on the St. John and Little Black rivers and stranded half the town after it broke up and released the water behind it.

At the town office, Gardner said there is space available so officials will have a place to move people to safety.

“All you can do is just get ready and wait,” Gardner said.

What officials are waiting for is to see how slowly or quickly the ice jam melts.

If the weather stays cool, the ice will “rot” slowly and prevent flooding, Mark Turner, hydrologist for the National Weather Service at Caribou, said Sunday. But a quick melt or a sudden force would break the jam and send water surging downstream, he said.

“The best thing we can hope for at this point is that the river water makes its way through [the ice] and that the jam stays where it is,” Turner said. “The worst thing that can happen is that if a jam from upstream breaks and comes down into Dickey [Village], you have two jams bashing into each other and all that water coming down on Dickey or the town of Allagash.”

Turner said the weather will stay cool for the next few days, though it is expected to warm up later in the week. That’s when officials will watch to see whether the ice jam melts slowly enough to prevent floodwaters from breaking through.

“We’re in a waiting game right now,” Turner said.