Professor f-f-f-freezes for icy lesson

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This article was published 09/12/2001 (9028 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

After spending 13 minutes in bone-chilling water yesterday — wearing nothing but normal winter clothing — one of the country’s foremost experts on winter survival had to be saved by Winnipeg firefighters.

Just before he was rescued, University of Manitoba professor Gordon Giesbrecht, who was making a training video at a retention pond in Transcona, said there would only be two possible outcomes for a person who had been in the water as long as he had been.

“Someone will rescue me or I will die — either by drowning or hypothermia,” Giesbrecht, 44, of the U of M’s Laboratory for Exercise and Environmental Medicine, said as several members of the media looked on.

“It may sound silly, but hopefully I’ll freeze my arms to the ice,” he told the gathering. “There have been many cases where people have been found by rescuers that way.”

“It’s best not be to be in this position,” said Giesbrecht. “Take the fire department’s advice and stay off the ice.”

As Giesbrecht mouthed those words — it was, by then, three minutes past the amount of time he expected to spend in the water — Norm Daly, a member of the firefighters’ water-rescue team, quickly aborted the shooting of the training video and sent the team into the water to take the professor out.

“You notice they’re trying to treat him gently — there is a chance he could go into ventricular fibrillation,” Daly said as the rescue team pulled Giesbrecht from the water and put him on a stretcher.

Giesbrecht may have been shooting the video to show the physiological effects of the water immersion process and how to survive falling through ice, but this was no Hollywood production with special effects.

The water was 2 C and firefighters had to cut through eight centimetres of real ice beforehand. The air temperature was a bracing -12 C, and seemed even colder because of the wind at the Pan Am Water Ski Pond at the east end of the city near Dugald Road.

Both in the water, and later after thawing out, Giesbrecht had a message for Winnipeggers and Manitobans: stay off the ice.

“I was in for 13 minutes and the minimum response time is 15 minutes for (rescue crews) just to get there,” he said, safe at home after downing three cups of steaming coffee and about a litre of hot chocolate.

“We’re basically trying to scare people off the ice. I don’t think I could have got myself out at the end. Unless someone could have come to get me, I wasn’t about to get out.”

Giesbrecht noted there has already been one death in the province due to thin ice. A 66-year-old Woodmore man, who was snowmobiling with two friends and a cousin, died when he broke through thin ice on Wallace Lake near the Ontario border earlier this month.

Dennis Antony of the city police river patrol said there are still several kilometres worth of open water on the city’s rivers, creeks and retention ponds.

“We want people to stay off the water, period,” he said.

Antony said the police and fire departments will use the video shot yesterday to make commercials to help convince Winnipeggers to stay off the ice.

Giesbrecht, who has been in frigid waters before, said it was the first time he had been in for so long.

During the filming of the video, Giesbrecht demonstrated both the right and wrong ways of trying to survive after breaking through ice. It necessitated him falling back into the chilly waters five times to the gasps of spectators.

Immediately after being first immersed, Giesbrecht yelled out that a person shouldn’t panic, but should stay calm after the initial shock of the chilly water.

“Well, it’s cold enough,” he admitted.

Giesbrecht then demonstrated how he was unsuccessful trying to get out of the water when he was at a right angle, but could pull himself out when he put his body parallel to the surface and kicked with his legs.

“You should go back to where you went in — it’s probably a good place with ice still thick enough to support you.”

Once out of the water, he said, a person should either roll or crawl away from where they broke through the ice.

With the help of a police officer, Giesbrecht also demonstrated how a bystander could help rescue a person in the water without becoming a victim by using a rope, ladder, or tree branch.

“Whatever you do, don’t go up to the hole — it’s best to have one victim and not two.”

PHOTO KEN GIGLIOTTI/WINNIPEG FREE PRESS

kevin.rollason

@freepress.mb.ca