Anchorage Daily News

A modern-day problem is delaying the resolution of one of Alaska's oldest traditions.

Organizers of the 92-year-old Nenana Ice Classic still aren't ready to announce how many people correctly guessed the exact minute when the ice broke up on the Tanana River, even though that moment happened a week ago.

The holdup?

"Our computer had an issue," Ice Classic administrative assistant Amanda Wubbold said Monday. "We had to have a laser card rushed to us from Ohio or Utah or someplace."

The glitch prevented contest organizers from printing out the database of entries, which they routinely check against the actual tickets filled out in pen or pencil by contest entrants who pay $2.50 per ticket.

With 243,776 tickets to check and then double-check, a lot of time goes into comparing the tickets to the computerized database. The process was put on hold as organizers waited for the laser card to arrive from Utah.

"There were several days when we could not print out those sheets," said Wubbold, who said the laser card wasn't available at the Anchorage computer company the contest uses.

So far, one winning ticket has been found. If no others emerge, a lone winner will pocket the entire $303,895 jackpot.

Wubbold said it's the third largest jackpot since the contest began in 1917, when railroad engineers bet $800 on when the Tanana would break up.

Breakup came this year at 10:53 p.m. Alaska Standard Time on May 6. That's when a tripod planted two feet deep into the Tanana River ice, 300 feet from shore between the highway bridge and the railroad bridge, broke free, headed downstream and tripped a wire that stopped a clock connected to it.

Wubbold predicted that workers will complete the chore of double-checking tickets against printouts this afternoon.

Besides the delay caused by not having a computerized comparison sheet, a handful of other things have slowed the process of declaring a winner or winners, Wubbold said.

"We have been short on workers," she said. Some of those hired to double-check the entries have already started seasonal jobs, she said. And a three-day high school music festival briefly made a segment of the teenage work force unavailable.

"This is not a process we can rush through," Wubbold said. "If there's one typo that makes (an entry) one minute off, it'll cost someone their winnings."

If no other winning ticket is discovered, the person with this year's correct guess will become just the 10th person in contest history to claim the entire jackpot.

Find Beth Bragg online at adn.com/contact/bbragg or call 257-4309.

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