newsminer.com

Officials on Wednesday were still scrambling to figure out how many winning tickets will split a $303,895 jackpot in this year’s Nenana Ice Classic after the wooden tripod on the Tanana River moved downstream and stopped the clock just before midnight Tuesday.

The winning time was 10:53 p.m. — even though the actual time was 11:53 p.m. — because officials use Alaska Standard Time, not daylight time, to figure the winning time.

As of Wednesday afternoon, workers had double-checked more than half of the almost 244,000 tickets that were sold for Alaska’s richest guessing game and had found only one winning ticket, according to Ice Classic manager Cherrie Forness.

“We’re still making sure everything is right, but at this point we’ve only got one ticket,” she said.

That ticket was purchased in Anchorage, Forness said. Officials won’t release the name of any winner or winners until all the tickets have been checked, which will likely be later today or early Friday, she said.

Given the fact the winning time was 10:53 p.m., chances are good there won’t be many more, if any, winners, she said.

“Not too many people pick that late at night,” Forness said.

According to Ice Classic records, this is only the second time in 92 years that the ice has gone out between 10 p.m. and 10:59 p.m. The only other breakup during that hour occurred at 10:50 p.m. on May 8, 1986.

That year also marked one of the nine times in the past 91 years that there was only one winning ticket, according to Ice Classic records. A 10-person pool from the Alaska National Bank of the North in Fairbanks split the jackpot of $115,000 that year. Their guess of 10:47 p.m. was the closest to the actual breakup time, so their ticket was declared the winner.

The last time one person took the whole jackpot home was 1992. Mary Lou Burke, a single mother of four who moved to Nenana only a couple months before breakup, won $165,000 when the ice went out at 6:26 a.m. on May 14. Burke’s guess of 6:28 a.m. was the closest to the actual time of breakup.

The one winning ticket officials had identified thus far was an individual, not a pool, and the guess was the actual breakup time, according to Ice Classic administrative assistant Amanda Wubbold.

Workers check tickets twice by comparing actual tickets to a printout of all the guesses. That process is done twice to ensure accuracy, she said.

The reason things are taking so long this year is that the printer broke and parts had to be ordered from out of state, Forness said.

“That put us behind,” she said. “We weren’t able to print at all for a few days.”

Contrary to some media reports, the tripod did not tip over and stop the clock, Forness said. Instead, some large sheets of ice floated down an open channel that formed upstream of the tripod and pushed the tripod downstream until it tightened a trip wire running to the clock on shore.

“It didn’t fall over; (the ice sheets) just took it out,” Forness said.

The tripod was still visible early Wednesday morning upstream of the Parks Highway bridge but it was out of sight by 9 a.m.