In less than a week, at least five Canadians have died after falling into icy bodies of water, renewing safety concerns as parts of the country see higher-than-normal temperatures.
I simply don’t understand people not taking ice seriously. Especially when half the lakes don’t even have ice on them at all!
I simply don’t understand people not taking climate change seriously. Especially when half the lakes don’t even have ice in them at all!
Climate change aside, it’s usually not cold enough for lakes to freeze in December. The average temps for December in much of Ontario is above 0C.
I dispute your “much of Ontario”—Northern Ontario is larger, areawise, than Southern Ontario, and everything north of and including Parry Sound has a subzero average December temperature. Lakes do freeze over in December up here—maybe not enough that it’s safe to walk out to the center of the larger ones, but in a normal year the ice would be solid enough by now that you could walk or take a skidoo some distance from shore.
The real issue, though, is people doing “what they’ve always done” at this time of year and paying more attention to the calendar dates than the exceptionally high temperatures we’ve been having.
(An entire family went through the ice on an ATV recently and may be among the deaths counted in the article—I think it was over near the Sault. Normally the ice would have been able to support them. This year it didn’t.)
Personally I always test the thickness of a lake and avoid it completely until the ice is at least 6" thick. It’s overkill, but lakes don’t freeze evenly so even if it’s 6" in one spot it may be thinner elsewhere. Although not everyone has an ice auger to test it either.
That’s not overkill. That just seems logical to me
Fuck around and find out… Seriously how daft can one be?