Giant Icicle in Hannibal is Probably Not a World Record, But it’s Pretty Impressive

Someone needs to skin that groundhog. I was driving to the KHMO studios in downtown Hannibal when I passed these gigantic icicles hanging off the roof of a building on Warren Barrett Drive. I've seen frozen waterfalls and enormous icicles on TV and online, but these are some of the largest I can recall seeing on a real building, in real life. That one in the foreground nearly stretches from the roof to the ground!

This winter has been brutal. The thermometer on my car said -11 when I left the house, but the National Weather Service said it was -4. In either case, it's been cold, and it's been intensely cold several times over the past few months. Temperatures are supposed to finally rise above the freezing mark later in the week, and highs near 40 are predicted for the weekend.

In case you're wondering, I did some Googling this morning on world record icicles. It turns out that the Guinness Book of World Records does not have a category for such a record, but I did see that there was once a 27-foot icicle in Scotland, and a 5-story icicle formed in North Carolina following a leak at an apartment building.