This ice is in hot water

Feb. 16, 2007
By JOSEPH M. DELEON News-Post Staff
jdeleon@fredericknewspost.com

  FREDERICK — Michael Suthers, 24, used three hand tools and about eight buckets of hot water to free his girlfriend's light blue Hyundai Accent from a blanket of ice at West Fifth and Bentz streets Thursday.
     “You don't pour the water on the car, just on the ice around the tires,” Suthers said. “It makes the ice so much easier to chip away.”
     He began about 11 a.m. Thursday, scraping and melting away between four and 6 inches of ice that had accumulated around the Hyundai. By 2 p.m., he only had the driver's side tires free.
     It would have taken longer if the couple hadn't cleared the snow and ice off the windshield, hood, roof and trunk Wednesday. For that, they simply used a plastic ice scraper and their hands.
     The steaming water Suthers poured from a red gallon-sized bucket helped weaken the ice. Next, he used a lawn edger — a flat, metal blade the size of a postcard at the end of a 4-foot wooden handle — to break up the ice.
     For hard-to-reach spots, he used a metal shovel. Once the ice was broken up, he moved it aside with a plastic snow shovel.
     “I just started this (technique) myself over the last few years,” he said. “It came in handy last winter when one of my co-workers was stuck in a parking lot at work.”
     Suthers runs an after-school program at Winters Mill High School in Westminster, while his girlfriend, Rebecca Pack, teaches high school in Frederick County.
     Neither of them had to work most of this week because the weather closed schools, but they expect schools will open today.
     “It was a nice three days to spend together,” Suthers said while taking a break from working on the front passenger tire. “We'll make sure we can get it out, then park it back in.”