Slick sidewalks and slushy crosswalks are the most obvious menaces after this week\u2019s storm, but New York City officials have another warning: Watch your head.<\/p>\n
The same wet, packable snow that made for easy snowmen<\/a> and snowball fights<\/a> is also clinging stubbornly to rooftops, window ledges and scaffolding across the five boroughs. As temperatures hover around or above freezing by day (it\u2019ll be in the mid-40s Wednesday) and dip into the 20s at night, that snow can melt, shift and refreeze into slabs of ice.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was more of a wet character than the previous storm,\u201d said Bill Goodman, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. \u201cSo it was sticking better on things.\u201d<\/p>\n In New York\u2019s canyon of high-rises, where buildings stretch hundreds of feet into the sky, even a relatively small chunk of ice can pick up speed quickly.<\/p>\n Frank Moscatelli, a clinical professor of physics at NYU, ran the numbers for Gothamist. If a 10-pound sphere of ice about 10 centimeters in diameter were to fall, he said, \u201cvery quickly” \u2014 in about three seconds \u2014 “it would reach a terminal velocity of close to 50 or 60 mph.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re talking about being potentially hit by something 10 pounds going 50 miles an hour. Uh, not pleasant.\u201d<\/p>\n And it wouldn\u2019t have to fall far to get there.<\/p>\n \u201cI would judge about 40 feet maybe,\u201d Moscatelli said \u2014 roughly four or five stories. \u201cNot much.\u201d<\/p>\n That means even mid-rise buildings can pose a risk if ice accumulates along parapets or ledges.<\/p>\n The speed, Moscatelli, is also \u201chighly determined by shape.\u201d Something pointy will fall faster. \u201cIt\u2019s all about plowing through the air.\u201d<\/p>\n New Yorkers have seen what can happen when ice falls from buildings. In 2018, a chunk of falling ice<\/a> totaled a Chevy Equinox. In 2014, frozen piles of snow slipped<\/a> from the sloped surfaces of One World Trade Center, forcing the closure of the PATH entrance below. That same year, a man sued a Midtown building\u2019s owner after he was hit by a falling piece of snow.<\/p>\n Moscatelli, who lives in the city, said he\u2019s mindful when buildings rope off sections of sidewalk after storms \u2014 as one building on his block recently did.<\/p>\n \u201cYou could walk more toward the curb,\u201d he suggested, for anyone who is worried.<\/p>\n Buildings Commissioner Ahmed Tigani said the city is now in the \u201csnow melt\u201d phase of storm response, which depends largely on property owners.<\/p>\n That includes clearing sidewalks, but also \u201cmaking sure that you\u2019re clearing icicles and snow masses from above your head \u2026 anything that can tilt down or fall on top of people.\u201d<\/p>\n So far, Tigani said, complaint levels appear consistent with past heavy snowfalls.<\/p>\n Tigani said it\u2019s not something the city is overly worried about, \u201cbut we are trying to make sure that people are doing the things that I just laid out so that we don’t have a problem in the first place.\u201d<\/p>\n Tigani encourages anybody who spots a dangerous overhang or falling ice to call 311.<\/p>\n As Goodman, the meteorologist, put it: \u201cEspecially in the city, you gotta be looking up and making sure nothing’s coming down.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Slick sidewalks and slushy crosswalks are the most obvious menaces after this week\u2019s storm, but New York City…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":144683,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[9,56,63,65,64],"class_list":{"0":"post-144682","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york-city","8":"tag-new-york","9":"tag-ny","10":"tag-nyc","11":"tag-nyc-headlines","12":"tag-nyc-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144682","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=144682"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144682\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/144683"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=144682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=144682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=144682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}