In December 2013, after an ice storm locked Dallas–Fort Worth below freezing for days, a guest at the Great Wolf Lodge in Grapevine, Texas, filmed the moment the thaw arrived. Huge sheets of ice let go of the sloping roof and thundered down the side of the building like a miniature avalanche.
The Great Wolf Lodge roof ice video
NBC 5 Dallas–Fort Worth published the clip on 11 December 2013 under the title "Must-See: Ice Falls Off Roof of Great Wolf Lodge". It was sent in by viewer Rachel E., who recorded it at the Grapevine lodge on the afternoon of Sunday, 8 December. Great Wolf Lodge is a chain of indoor water park resorts that began in 1997 as Black Wolf Lodge and took its current name in 2000.
The roofline gives the footage its scale. The building stays still while the ice slides, breaks into slabs and drops past the windows in a few seconds.
The December 2013 North Texas ice storm
The ice came from one of the region's most disruptive winter storms. According to the National Weather Service in Fort Worth, freezing rain, sleet and a little snow began on the afternoon of Thursday, 5 December and lasted into the morning of 6 December. DFW Airport recorded 1.25 inches of liquid precipitation, and ice and sleet piled up to 5 inches deep in a band from Denton through Sherman to Bonham.
- Temperatures at DFW stayed below freezing for most of the next five days.
- At the peak, 275,000 customers in North Texas lost power.
- Hundreds of vehicles were stranded on I-35 and I-20, and DFW and Love Field cancelled hundreds of flights.
- Seven people died, and hundreds were injured in falls on the ice.
- Insured residential losses passed $30 million.
Traffic and road sand turned the frozen sleet into lumpy "cobblestone ice" up to 4 inches thick, which took weeks to clear in places.
Why roof ice falls during a thaw
When a thick layer of sleet and freezing rain sits on a roof for days, it bonds into a solid sheet. As the sun and warmer air return, meltwater forms at the base of the sheet, between the ice and the roofing. That thin film acts like a lubricant, and on a sloping roof gravity does the rest: large slabs slide off all at once.
The National Weather Service counted falling ice among the damage to vehicles, homes and other structures during the storm. Days after the event, workers in Plano and other cities were still breaking thick ice off buildings to prevent it from falling on people below.
Staying safe around falling ice
Treat the area beneath a loaded roof edge as a fall zone during a thaw: respect barriers and closed walkways, and choose entrances away from the eaves. North Texas already had a hard lesson. In 2011, stagehand Severin Sampson was preparing the Super Bowl XLV halftime show outside Cowboys Stadium in Arlington when ice slid from the roof; he said he suffered a fractured skull, a ruptured eardrum and a brain injury. Vehicles count too: in the same December 2013 thaw, a driver was hit by ice flying off an SUV in the next lane, so clear the roof of your car before you drive.
Explore more: another roof-snow incident; professional avalanche work in a mountain setting.
Related reading
- Snow Roller: A Strange Meteorological Phenomenon
- The May 2013 Ice Shoves at Mille Lacs and Dauphin Lake
- The Ilulissat Calving Sequence in Chasing Ice
- The Sheyenne River Ice Circle Seen by George Loegering
- Shout Out Louds’ Blue Ice Record Project
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