Falling ‘ice bombs’ on the Ravenel Bridge? It’s happened, and there’s no plan to fix it

The first time chunks of thawing ice fell from the cables of the Ravenel Bridge, Elisabeth Wolfsen saw the chaos that ensued.

Cars swerved sharply between lanes as drivers tried (and sometimes failed) to dodge the massive chunks of melting ice. The ice, which had frozen around the bridge’s support cables and diamond-shaped towers during an unseasonably cold day in January 2014, was melting. The ice shards were plummeting toward the traffic below.

The ice shattered on impact as it smashed into lanes of traffic in a Southern city where the greatest weather concerns are usually flooding and hurricanes — not giant chunks of ice falling seemingly from the sky.

Wolfsen, who was then on patrol for the Charleston Police, rushed to help a man whose car had been hit by the ice.

“He got out of his car and took a step to his right when a human-sized ice javelin fell from the sky and landed right where he had just been standing,” Wolfsen said.

And there’s nothing in place to stop it from happening again.

Since that first incident in 2014, similar ice events have happened here as recently as last weekend, when falling ice forced the Ravenel Bridge to close for a combined eight hours on Saturday and Sunday.

The problem also happened in 2017 and 2018.

Each time, it has forced city officials to shut down the Ravenel Bridge, a Charleston landmark and a major transportation artery that connects Mount Pleasant to the downtown Charleston peninsula.

In 2019, before the coronavirus pandemic, the bridge saw an average daily traffic count of 97,900 vehicles.

But despite the major disruption these ice incidents create, South Carolina transportation officials say there is no talk of trying to fix this rare but recurring problem in one of the state’s most populous and popular regions.

Pete Poore, a spokesman for the S.C. Department of Transportation, instead points to the high-definition cameras the agency installed on the towers of the bridge after the 2014 event. With these cameras, he explained that law enforcement and emergency officials can monitor what’s happening up on the bridge in real-time.

“They can zoom, pan and tilt — all that stuff — so that you can see the ice forming or if it is falling,” Poore said.

But Poore confirmed there is nothing in place that can stop the ice from forming in the first place, a gap in preparedness that leaves officials here with only one way to respond: Watching and waiting.

Shannon Scaff, the city of Charleston’s Emergency Management director, said he hopes no one is giving up on finding a potential solution. He looked at the bridge in the distance as he spoke.

“We don’t want to see things like that happen. And so, you know, sometimes Mother Nature does what she does, and we just have to respond accordingly,” Scaff said. “But having an aviation background myself, you know, there are ways to keep airplanes in the sky — whatever it takes. I see it the same way with this bridge. It’s such an important infrastructure piece to the Lowcountry, but really to the country, and it’s just a beautiful structure. I’d hate to think that someone would be at risk simply by trying to get from one side to the other.”

Robert Kudelka, another spokesman at the S.C. Department of Transportation, said the state has tried to find a solution.

In a written statement, Kudelka said the agency has considered and discussed multiple techniques in the past about how to best address the icing issue. Some of the ideas thrown around included wax coating, brushing systems, vibration techniques and heating elements.

In June 2014, the agency identified a possible solution. The plan was to install a pulse electrothermal de-icing system, or PETD, on the bridge’s cables. The technology uses both heating elements and a pulse system meant to work in tandem and, theoretically, keep ice from forming.

But the state was relying on a $9 million federal grant to fund the work. Instead, the Federal Emergency Management Agency rejected the state’s request.

It’s unclear if the state has tried again, but Poore said he was not aware of any active efforts to revisit the project.

In the meantime, local agencies like the Charleston and Mount Pleasant police departments have used past experiences to inform how to best handle falling ice on the iconic cable-stayed bridge.

Wolfsen, who is now a spokeswoman for the Charleston Police, said there was an increase in staff for the most recent ice event.

Real-time monitoring of the bridge cameras, along with dispatching more officers to the bridge itself, helped agencies determine when it was time to close the bridge entirely, as it did last Sunday, or whether to only close specific lanes based on how the ice was falling, like it did at last Saturday.

But Mount Pleasant Mayor Will Haynie said he’s taking a more cautious approach when it comes to any potential bridge fixes as it relates to ice.

“Any any cure could be worse than the problem,” Haynie pointed out. “There could be more bridge closures to install a heating system than there have been as a result of the ice-fall.”

Even so, Haynie said he could not deny the disruption that the so-called “Ravel-anche” created.

The entire Charleston area has seen its share of bridge snafus through the years, from falling ice on the Ravenel to a falling tarp during rush hour on the Don Holt Bridge to an emergency closure on the Wando bridge after a broken cable was discovered.

“There’s no doubt how much we depend on our bridges around here, and when one goes out, we can feel it all over,” Haynie said.

The mayor also said he would like to see stakeholders, including the town of Mount Pleasant, the city of Charleston, S.C. DOT and state climatologists come together to discuss what takeaways, if any, can be drawn from these recent ice events so that local municipalities can continue to respond swiftly in the future.

This weekend, cold weather is again in the forecast for the South Carolina coast.

Blair Holloway, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Charleston, said forecasts show a potential for a light dusting but, thankfully, no ice or freezing rain.