Monday January 31, 2000

Bob Laing of Barrhaven was sitting in his family room early Saturday afternoon when something hit his roof with a loud bang.

"It sounded like a hand grenade going off, and you could hear a rumble as it rolled off the roof," he said.

He didn't find the object until yesterday, when he discovered a ball of ice shaped like a basketball outside the dining room window of his home on Pepperrall Crescent. It weighed about five kilograms.

"I could see there were little stones from shingles that were embedded, and there was, like, tar from shingles, so I knew that it was the thing that hit the roof," he said.

But there wasn't very much of the roof material stuck to the ball. "It was pure ice," he said.

"If it had ever hit anybody it'd have killed them," said Mr. Laing, 74, who planned to call the federal Department of Transport today to find out whether they're interested in examining it further.

It might have come from an airplane, he suggested, or it might be space debris, perhaps from a comet.

"There was a case in Spain where these things were falling and they were all wondering about it," said Mr. Laing, who saw news reports about the Spanish incidents. Indeed, between Jan. 8 and 20 about 30 such ice balls, also described as the size and shape of basketballs, fell throughout Spain, puzzling scientists there.

Though a number of the Spanish ice hunks were thought to have been practical jokes perpetrated after initial reports of the phenomenon, scientists in Spain were taking the matter seriously. At first, they thought it might have been sewage dropped by airplanes, but the icy chunks were found to be almost pure water.

At least one sample, analysed in a laboratory, also contained sodium chloride, or table salt, and chalk, which weakens the theory they may have come from a comet.

Mr. Laing was concerned enough to carefully preserve the Barrhaven ice ball: He wrapped it in two plastic bags, one over the other in case of leaks, and placed it in his freezer.

"The government, they can cut it open. I'm going to keep it in the freezer and they can have a look at it," he said last night.

"It's certainly not sewage, you can see that, it's pure water," he said. But it could still have fallen from an airplane, he said. "There's lots of airplanes flying around here."

Meteorologist Tim Bullock of Environment Canada said he could think of no weather phenomenon to explain the falling ice.

But there was some cloud, quite high up in the sky on Saturday, that could have formed ice on an airplane, he speculated. This ice might have dropped when the airplane lowered its gear to prepare for a landing at the nearby Ottawa Airport.

"That is sheer speculation, not even having seen it (the ice ball)" Mr. Bullock stressed.

Also, Mr. Bullock said he could not comment on the likelihood of any kind of space debris such as a comet or meteorite. "Rocks and meteorites are out of our jurisdiction," he said.

Mr. Laing said there are no tree branches over his house, or any other structure the ice could have fallen from, but many airplanes do fly over his house on the way to the airport.

He's still not sure how much damage the impact did to his roof.
"I'm an old man, so I couldn't go up and see," he said. "I'll know the first rainstorm I guess."

"This thing hitting my roof, it's a chance in a billion," he laughed, "yet I buy sweepstakes (tickets) all the time and I never win."