- The North Dakota National Guard was called out to take care of an ice jam on the Missouri River.
- Ice jams may cause rivers to rise, causing local flooding.
- The Guard used Black Hawk helicopters with water buckets to interrupt up the jam, saving the nearby community from the specter of flooding.
Assault helicopters from the North Dakota National Guard were called out to take care of an unusual threat: a buildup of river ice. In response, the Guard called out two UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, which took turns dumping greater than two tons of water on the ice until it broke free. While this operation was carried out entirely without explosives, there are many instances outside the U.S. through which governments are all too completely happy to easily bomb Mother Nature into submission.
Flood Risk
In late February, ice jams began to form within the Missouri River near the town of Bismarck, North Dakota. Ice jams are attributable to chunks of ice blocking the flow of a river. This causes icy water to accumulate behind the jam that would spill the banks of a river and flood nearby communities. On February 29, the river exceeded the minor flood stage, rising to a height of 14.92 feet.
The flooding was considered serious enough that the state began working with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to lower ice levels and get the river moving again. Consequently, two UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters of the North Dakota National Guard were dispatched to the flood zone. Each carried a “Bambi Bucket”—a collapsible bucket slung underneath a Black Hawk able to carrying as much as 660 gallons of water. The buckets are typically used for firefighting, with helicopters dipping the buckets right into a body of water from a hover position, scooping up a bucketful, after which releasing the water over a wildfire.
Water weighs eight kilos per gallon, so each time a helicopter with a Bambi Bucket drops its load, it releases as much as 5,280 kilos of water directly. The North Dakota National Guard hoped that repeatedly dropping two and a half tons of water on the jam would act like a watery piledriver, pummeling the accrued ice and getting the river flowing again.
It worked. In response to the North Dakota National Guard, a “20 by 20-foot section of ice was dislodged on the primary pass. Around 6 p.m., progress was made, and the ice began to maneuver down the river. 100 and eighteen buckets dropped over 70,000 gallons of water in 4 hours.” As of Friday, March 1, the Missouri River is moving by itself again and the emergency has passed.
They do it otherwise in Russia and China
Ice jams are a problem in lots of countries, especially those within the northern latitudes, including China and Russia. Each feature vast swathes of territory with rivers that freeze and governments that take aggressive actions to repair problems like these. The result: bombs as a substitute of Bambi Buckets.
In 2010, China’s People’s Liberation Army Air Force used H-6 bombers to interrupt up ice jams on the Yellow River. Six H-6K strategic bombers from the 28th Air Regiment, each carrying eight conventional high explosive bombs, made bombing runs on the river that is usually considered the cradle of Chinese civilization. Although the H-6’s basic design dates to the Nineteen Fifties and it’s vulnerable on today’s battlefield, it suited ice-breaking quite well and the Chinese government considered the mission a hit. The tactic was repeated in 2014.
In 2016, the Russian Aerospace Forces bombed the Sukhona River, situated roughly 250 miles north of Moscow. Two Su-34 “Fullback” tactical bombers from Voronezh Malshevo Air Base carried out the mission. The bombing was also considered a hit. Russia may need more difficulty executing one other strike today, nevertheless—for the reason that country’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, it has lost roughly twenty percent of its Su-34 fleet to enemy fire.