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One of the weirdest parts of life is the fact that there’s only so much you can do to avoid becoming the victim of the kind of freak occurrence you couldn’t even imagine until it happened to you—like a huge chunk of ice coming detached from a plane and falling thousands of feet before smashing through the roof of your house.
The FAA oversees around 45,000 flights that make their way through the airspace over the United States on a daily basis, and there are usually thousands of planes traversing the country at any given time.
The commercial airlines that are responsible for the bulk of those flights employ plenty of people who are tasked with ensuring their planes meet the many regulations that help make air travel the statistically safest form of transportation for passengers, but there are still plenty of things that can go wrong given the many factors at play.
Those aircraft are equipped with de-icing systems designed to prevent large chunks from forming while the planes are making their way through the sky (the air temperature at cruising altitude can be as low as -65°F), and while they tend to be pretty effective, they certainly aren’t foolproof.
According to WFTV, first responders were dispatched to a home in Palm Coast, Florida on Monday afternoon after receiving a call concerning an incident that left “multiple pieces of ice” strewn across a neighborhood while damaging the house with a roof that ended up sporting a gaping hole thanks to what transpired.
Palm Coast Fire Chief Kyle Berryhill said no one was home at the time (the structure was determined to be safe for occupancy in the wake of the damage) and no injuries were reported. However, he added the six-foot-by-three-foot ice chunk “the size of a person” discovered at the scene could have easily led to a fatality if the circumstances had been different.
The exact cause of the incident is unclear, but the FAA is conducting an investigation into the matter; two commercial planes flew over the neighborhood shortly before the ice chunk made the unexpected appearance, and it seems safe to assume it managed to form on one of them before becoming dislodged.
This occurred less than a year after another home in Florida was damaged by a piece of space junk linked to the International Space Station and around a month after a village in Kenya had a close encounter with its own uninvited extraterrestrial trash.