On New Year's Eve, most of Tallinn was left without water. The local water utility Tallinna Vesi stated that a rare weather phenomenon was to blame, reports ERR.
"Tallinna Vesi encountered problems on the morning of December 31, they tried to fix them and for a while, they succeeded," noted Tallinn's vice mayor Tiit Terik.
As a result, by the evening, the water began to completely disappear. Backup wells were activated for hospitals. However, the main flow of water from Lake Ülemiste was almost completely halted.
The cause was a combination of cold weather and strong winds. Under normal conditions, when it is freezing, the lake is covered with a layer of ice, and water flows calmly into the pipes. But in recent days, there has been strong wind, and the ice could not form, while the water temperature began to drop below zero and freeze.
"When the water cools below zero degrees, a phenomenon occurs called frazil ice. Small ice crystals that form in the water concentrate together and create what is known as an ice crust when they come into contact with other objects, such as metal," explained the executive director of Tallinna Vesi, Alexander Timofeev.
In other words, a mixture of cold water and ice clung to the grid of the water intake channel. By the evening of December 31, divers had to manually break the ice.
"The thickness of the ice was 25 centimeters, and half an hour after the ice was cleared, the cameras showed that new ice had formed. This procedure - cleaning these grids - was repeated several times until the crystallization of ice in the channel decreased," noted Timofeev.
By 8 a.m. on January 1, water supply was fully restored. According to a representative of Tallinna Vesi, a similar problem occurred at their station nearly 50 years ago.
