Lake Erie Homes Look Surreal After Being Encased With Thick Ice From Storm

"It looks fake, it looks unreal," one resident living in the Hoover Beach neighborhood of Hamburg, New York, said.

Talk about eerie.

Residents who live along the shore of Lake Erie in Hamburg, New York, were probably feeling pretty frosty when they woke up to find their homes encased in a dense layer of ice on Saturday.

Houses along Hoover Beach are blanketed in thick ice from Lake Erie’s waves on Saturday, Feb. 29, 2020, in Hamburg, New York.
Houses along Hoover Beach are blanketed in thick ice from Lake Erie’s waves on Saturday, Feb. 29, 2020, in Hamburg, New York.
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Residents say they’ve never seen an ice coating — some of which is estimated to be 3 feet thick — quite like this before.

“It looks fake, it looks unreal,” Ed Mis, who has lived in Hoover Beach for eight years, told CNN. “It’s dark on the inside of my house. It can be a little eerie, a little frightening.”

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The surreal scene — which looks like something Elsa from “Frozen” would conjure after going to a Van Gogh exhibit — occurred thanks to a nightmarish combination of unusual climate conditions.

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“Talk about weather catastrophes where everything comes together at the wrong place at the wrong time,” Tom Niziol, a winter weather expert, told The Weather Channel.

According to Niziol, the area experienced 48 straight hours of gale-force winds. These strong winds, which peaked at 60 miles per hour, created huge waves that sprayed lake water on the homes.

But what makes this situation unique is the area’s lack of an ice cover.

“Lake Eerie typically has significant ice over by this time of the year and that protects the shoreline from these battering storms,” Niziol explained. “But right now, the lake has no ice cover at all on its eastern end.”

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And although the site is strangely beautiful, homeowners in the area aren’t thrilled about what’s going to happen once the ice begins to thaw.

“With the weather going up to 50 [degrees] next week, we’ll have to worry about the melting, the flooding,” Mis told Buffalo news channel WGRZ-TV.

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He also noted that the area has been hit pretty hard by the elements in the past year.

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“This is like, our sixth storm in a matter of a few months,” he told the local outlet. “And it’s kind of wearing on everybody. Never have I seen anything like this in the past.”

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