From today’s Pioneer Press.
Whales? Organ music? St. Paul residents try to place eerie early-morning noise
By Joseph Lindberg
[email protected]
Posted: 02/13/2014 12:01:00 AM CST | Updated: about 17 hours ago
Part ocean waves, part wild animal call, part distorted howl — whatever the sound was in St. Paul on Thursday morning, it most likely was coming from the Mississippi River.
The sound began bouncing through the southern edges of St. Paul about 4 a.m., stretching from the Highland Park neighborhood and along the length of Shepard Road into the area of West Seventh Street.
Neither the National Park Service or Army Corps of Engineers could identify exactly what the sound was Thursday morning, but it most likely came from shifting river ice.
On e-democracy.org, a neighborhood-level community blogging website, Highland Park residents exchanged theories about the sounds. Descriptions included scraping metal, industrial grinding, voices over a loudspeaker, even music.
Between 4:30 and 4:50 a.m., the Ramsey County Emergency Communications Center got about 10 noise calls from St. Paul residents, said Scott Williams, who oversees the center. The calls were made to 911 and the non-emergency lines. The callers were all south of Randolph Avenue between Snelling and Cleveland avenues.
“Callers were describing it as an organ, whales, a horn blowing, and just general noise,” Williams said in an email.
Officers checked a couple of the areas where the noise was reported, but there was no indication of what it was, Williams said.
The calls about a horn blowing came about 30 minutes after the last of the other calls, so those might have been unrelated, he said.
Temperatures peaked at 24 degrees Wednesday afternoon, the warmest high temperature in St. Paul since late January, according to the National Weather Service. The temperature fell to 15 degrees by 3 a.m. Thursday before spiking to nearly 30 degrees by 11 a.m.
And temperatures could continue to cycle in coming days, causing more breaks and fissures in ice — while high temperatures will remain in the low-20s this weekend, they’ll warm by next week and likely chase the mid-30s with lows dipping into the teens by nightfall, the weather service said.
Mara H. Gottfried contributed to this report.
Joseph Lindberg can be reached at 651-228-5513. Follow him at twitter.com/JosephLindberg.
