Ice blasting

The river, filled with melt water, will quickly flood and often cause damage to nearby settlements.

Thus in most northern areas governments quickly act to break up the ice jams before they can do much damage.

In the large rivers of the Siberia the Russian airforce is sometimes called in to bomb ice jams.

The city of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, for instance, blasts the Rideau River each spring to break up the ice.

In 1994, for instance, 10,000 sticks of dynamite were used to break up ice along 9 kilometres of the river.