Water gushed from a 2008 Buick on Thursday as cables slowly pulled it from the icy depths of White Bear Lake, where it had sat frozen solid for a month in a nearly vertical position.
Frozen Buick finally freed from White Bear Lake’s icy grip
The ordeal took five people roughly two hours.
The Minnesota Star Tribune
February 27, 2025 at 11:02PM
Towing company operators who volunteered for the job used two long cables, a tall metal frame and a pulley system with motors to extract the car at an angle from above.
It hadn’t been an easy task; The sedan had been stuck in about 10 feet of water since Jan. 27, garnering attention on social media. Attempts to pull it out last weekend were unsuccessful.
The car’s 41-year-old owner, who was not at the scene Thursday, had told authorities it plunged through a pressure ridge on the lake.
Once the car started to emerge from the lake Thursday morning, operators had to contend with a giant chunk of ice frozen to its bottom. The car’s front doors wouldn’t open, either, so the crew had to wait for water to drain through the front end of the car when it was about halfway out.
The ordeal took five people about two hours, said Corey Albertson, owner of American Towing and Recovery, of Lake Elmo.
The car’s owner was coming up on a 30-day deadline to remove the vehicle, or the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office would have retrieved it. By law, the agency would then charge the owner two to five times the cost it took to pull it out.
Albertson estimated it would have cost the owner about $8,000 for all the work that went into retrieving the car.
“I could tell in his voice and everything he was telling me that, financially, he didn’t have the resources to make it happen,” Albertson said. “I decided to reach out to Bruce’s Legacy to see if we could get a volunteer group together so he didn’t get fined or charged an exorbitant amount of money.”
The group, which extracted and towed the car for free, included Keith Cormican of Bruce’s Legacy of Black River Falls, Wis., and Rex Towing and Recovery of Cannon Falls.
For Karl Erickson, an angler educator, who chronicled the Buick’s days frozen in the ice on social media, seeing it come out of the lake was a relief.
“I’m glad it’s out of the lake,” he said. “Let’s get the pollution out and keep our rivers and lakes clean.”
The company’s plan for backup power plants have sparked debate over whether there are cleaner alternatives.
