Some crazy video footage has emerged of a large block of ice falling from the sky in London and landing just feet from a street cleaner. Here’s the video footage of the incident, which occurred on Wednesday:
The footage was captured from the security camera of a nearby taxi company. Fortunately no one was hit, as I imagine a chunk of ice that big falling from the sky could easily be deadly if it hits someone directly.
Sky News reports that the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority receives about 30 reports of ice falling from the sky per year. The assumption is generally that ice falls from airplanes, and that’s especially likely here, given that this was near the approach path for Heathrow. Typically the origin of falling ice is either when there’s a leak in a plane, or when planes were flying at a higher altitude and had ice form, and then as they get to lower altitudes the ice melts and falls off.
While the CAA records the number of incidents, they don’t investigate them due to the challenges associated with figuring out the origin. I’m a bit surprised by that, since in a case like this you’d think they could tell based on when the ice fell and which plane was on the approach path at that point. Obviously there’s not much that can be done if this was just melting ice, but if there was a leak, there is something that could potentially be fixed.
Thank goodness that no one was hurt.
(Tip of the hat to @J053PH_)
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