The ice abides: Be careful out there

Late in the movie Titanic, a couple of the lead characters slogg their way through waist-deep water in the ship’s passageways as they try to escape. The flaw in these scenes is that the people show no signs of physical comfort – only emotional panic – when the reality is they would have been in utter agony.

I grew up on Lake Michigan and remember what it was like at the beach on days when the water temperature was in the mid- to high 50s. Step in and within seconds your feet would ache; you just had to get out and take a break. You could get accustomed to the water after a while and the pain would subside; you might even decide take a dip. But that first encounter with the water? Brrrrr! 

Now imagine how water at around 32 degrees would feel. And in the ice-strewn North Atlantic where the Titanic went down, the water might have been even colder than that. Dissolved salt lowers water’s freezing point; seawater freezes at 28 to 29 degrees F.

But I digress. The point I am getting to is that you want to be careful on your lake now that, most likely, ice has taken hold, as on Birch Lake, near Harshaw, Wis., where I live. Because if you were to break through, drowning might not be your most pressing concern. Hypothermia likely would be.

Odds are that if you broke through you would find yourself holding onto the “shelf” of unbroken ice around the hole you made. And the very cold water would go to work on you immediately. If the water you fell into were between 32 and 40 degrees – a likely scenario on our winter lakes – you would have 15 to 30 minutes before becoming exhausted or losing consciousness. That’s according to the United States Search and Rescue Task Force (USSRTF). Here is how the USSRTF describes the effect of falling into frigid water:

“The first hazards to contend with are panic and shock. The initial shock can place severe strain on the body, producing instant cardiac arrest...Survivors of cold-water accidents have reported the breath driven from them on first impact with the water. Should your face be in the water during that first involuntary gasp for breath, it may well be water rather than air. Total disorientation may occur after cold-water immersion. Persons have reported “thrashing helplessly in the water” for 30 seconds or more until they were able to get their bearings.

“Immersion in cold water can quickly numb the extremities to the point of uselessness...  Within minutes, severe pain clouds rational thought...finally, hypothermia (exposure) sets in, and without rescue and proper first aid treatment, unconsciousness and death. Normal body temperature of course, is 98.6 [degrees F]. Shivering and the sensation of cold can begin when the body temperature lowers to approximately 96.5. Amnesia can begin to set in at approximately 94, unconsciousness at 86 and death at approximately 79 degrees.”

So, don’t kid yourself that you could easily survive a trip down through your lake’s ice. Be extremely careful out there. In the next post I’ll pass along some experts’ tips on what to do if you were to break through – or how to help a companion who has that misfortune.