How to Survive a Fall Through Ice

Description

Learn a life-saving self-rescue skill essential for all outdoors people who venture out into winter. By learning how to reduce your cold shock and get yourself out of the water with these techniques, you can save your life or help someone who has fallen through the ice to save theirs. This technique is designed for use in still water, such as a lake, and will work even if you are wearing bulky clothes. It allows you to move your body up onto ice that cannot support your standing weight, and teaches how to move over the ice until you reach ice with weight-bearing capacity.

If you are wearing skiis or snowshoes, you can first move through the cold shock portion of your self-rescue, then calmly attempt to raise your legs through applying even downward pressure with your arms on the ice shelf and arching your butt upward, followed by extending your legs out behind you. If successful, gently pull yourself forward. If this is unsuccessful, you must attempt to remove the skiis/snowshoes, or if necessary to save your life, your boots.

Cold water immersion is a potentially life-threatening situation. Do not attempt unless under professional supervision. This video was shot at the ReWild University training grounds in Wisconsin by a highly-trained wilderness instructor with rescue staff in attendance.

Music by Kevin MacLeod. He has great royalty-free music at http://incompetech.com. Please consider donating if you use his music.

Visit http://rewildu.com/classes/ for unique educational opportunities in rewilding, wilderness skills, mindfulness, martial arts, primal fitness, homesteading, and more.

Tags: Kenton Whitman,ReWild University,Human Rewilding,personal rewilding,mindfulness,how to,bushcraft,survival,wilderness survival skills,how to survive in the woods,how to survive falling through the ice,ice breakthrough,self-rescue skills,rescue skills,How To Survive (TV Program)

Video Transcription

today I would like to share with you a life-saving skill every year people die from falling through the ice some of these deaths could be prevented I'm going to be demonstrating a highly effective self rescue measure that can get you out of the ice if you've fallen through if you're an outdoors person this is a vital skill to have first we have to understand what happens when we fall through the ice as soon as our body hits that cold water we have a physiological response called the cold shock response what that means is that our respiration rate increases dramatically our heart rate increases our blood pressure increases and when that happens we can experience sudden death that is the first danger that we have to overcome is to try to mitigate that cold shock response to do that we have to attempt to not fall into panic when we fall through the ice we begin to panic that's going to further increase our respiration further increase our heart rate and further increase our blood pressure that increases our risk of experiencing that sudden death your mindfulness practice comes into play here I'll be demonstrating how my body goes into that cold shock response and how that response can be ease it can last for up to four minutes but with proper relaxation it can be gone much more quickly you'll see me gasping for air my eyes probably wide and then I will relax into it and you'll see the physiological response shift my heart rate go back down my breathing decelerate my blood pressure will drop and I'll be able to pay attention to the second aspect of self rescue the second aspect of self rescue is getting yourself up and out of the water otherwise you're going to be experiencing hypothermia eventually grow weaker and weaker and drown despite what we see on the movies we don't get out of the ice by clawing and panicking and fighting our way out there's a very simple way to get ourselves out of the water

after we've fallen through if we try to fight our way out we're just going to be breaking the ice we're trying to drag all the weight of our legs up and out it's not easy so what we're going to do instead is after we fall through I'm going to begin to kick my legs and kick them up until I'm essentially on my belly floating in the water then I'm going to kick hard and push myself kick myself up and onto the ice so in brief I'm going to demonstrate what happens to our body physiologically when we fall through we're going to show you that that physiological response can be mitigated then I'm going to display how to get yourself out of the water once I'm up on the ice again I don't want to immediately stand up I already know that the ice in this area is thin so standing up could very well plunge me back into the water instead I'm going to stay on my belly crawl forward until I'm far away from where I fell through and then slowly get up onto all fours and when I feel that I'm at a place where there's thick ice again I can stand and make my way to shore you'll notice when I fall through the ice that my arms are going to go out my legs will also begin to spread I'm trying to slow my descent through the water to not get full submersion if possible because there is also a gasp response my head goes under and I'm unable to hold my breath I can inhale water and begin the drowning process I'm trying to keep myself from going under all the way I'm going to reach for the nearest ice shelf I'm going to bring myself over to it and then I'm going to do my best to just realize that within four minutes at the longest this cold shock response will pass I will again be calm relaxed and able to bring myself up and out of the water with that mindset I'm able to mitigate that cold shock response and be in a much better position to effectively kick myself up and out of the water okay so this is the cold shock response which really can be mitigated if you just relaxed and realize that it's going to pass and then after it passes you'll be able to do the second part of yourself rescue so I spread my arms out so that I didn't get fully immersed in that gasp response didn't make me inhale water so I've survived my cold shock response now to get out instead of trying to pull myself straight up and you start to kick my feet and raise them up behind me and then catch come on Vlad I know I don't want to stand up now Dewey's myself forward until I feel like I'm on stronger ice test it and start to move towards chart stalking going again just to show from a different angle that kicking so again we're kicking our feet raising them out behind us and then kicking forward off the others so kicking my feet then we come up behind that's what brings me safely onto the ice

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