Ice rams house

Three weeks ago, Zona Lie’s family ran out of their house in Kotzebue, Alaska, to avoid being crushed by a gigantic sheet of ice, the Anchorage Daily News reports.

On May 27, while members of the Lie family were still in bed there was a pounding at the door from a municipal official warning them of the danger.

Zona Lie called 911 and yelled, “There is ice coming into my house!”

She and her four children barely escaped the ice that slammed into their house.

When spring breakup comes, Kotzebue and the peninsula it sits on are surrounded by massive chunks of ice flowing from surrounding lakes through a narrow channel to Kotzebue Sound and the Chukchi Sea.

Lie’s house on Shore Avenue sits at the edge of Kotzebue Sound.

During a normal year, the ice is “rotten” by the time it breaks loose from the lakes and drifts down.

But this year a week of record-breaking temperatures in May set huge sections of solid, still-thick winter ice adrift. These huge sheets stayed in one piece as they moved downstream into Kotzebue Sound.