"The strangest thing [he] had ever seen" – that was the reaction of the insurance adjuster called to the scene of a Nepean home with a gaping hole in its roof, suspected to be the result of frozen sewage falling from passing plane.
An Ottawa woman woke to a 'giant crashing noise,' just meters from where she lay sleeping in her mother's Nepean home.
Stephanie Moore, a 36-year-old teacher with the Ottawa Catholic School Board says she was awakened at by the loud noise at 2 a.m. on Sunday and soon discovered the gaping hole in the ceiling of the hallway outside the bedroom where she had been sleeping.
The light of day showed a hole roughly a metre across punched in the hall ceiling. Damage was apparent to the roof planking and the shingles in photographs taken in the attic, where daylight could be seen shining through the ruined roof.
Moore said both her insurance adjuster and the roof repair expert who came to her mother's home in the wake of the crash called it "the strangest thing they have ever seen."
It was the roofer who suggested that frozen sewage jettisoned from a passing airliner, also known as “blue ice” after the colour of the disinfectant used in the sewage systems of commercial aircraft.
Ice incidents from aircraft although rare, do occur – a recent BBC report puts the annual number of aircraft ice damage reports at 35 a year, and in the past 40 years that the CAA has been recording such events, 5 people have been hit. Ice is not, however the greatest risk to those below – late last year a stowaway plunged from a British Airways flight – hitting an office block in Richmond, again, in the UK.
Transport Canada said in a statement Tuesday the ministry was aware of the incident and is looking into it.
"The department takes all reports of possible debris coming from aircraft very seriously. Every reported incident is investigated by Transport Canada officials," said spokesperson Natasha Gauthier.
