Skating on Thin Ice

I live on a lake. I chose to live here because I wanted to use the lake and because I knew that the property would appreciate faster than if there was no lake. It’s one of those storm drain lakes but the water is clean and full of crayfish. It’s nice to be able to use it for boating in the summer and skating in the winter.

Our lake has a little problem, however. The developer ploughed a lot of vegetation under it when it was being constructed. Ever since, this has been rotting and producing methane. It bubbles up though the water all year round. The methane is not sufficient that it can be smelled or to be harmful but it does stir up the water enough in the winter to leave some polynya’s. That is, there are holes in the ice in the winter. These are confined to a small area, roughly 10% of the lake, just by my house. They don’t move. Well, you wouldn’t expect them to that, would you? They grow and diminish in size with the temperature a bit but not too much. One can actually walk right up to the edges of these holes without any safety concerns as the ice is about 18 inches think at the height of winter.

We lived quite happily with this for 5 years or so. Some people would clear off two or three area around the far edges for skating - nowhere near the polynyas. Everything was idyllic.

Then one winter’s day we received a letter from the city banning everyone from using the lake for skating. They thought it was unsafe. The letter so upset people living around the lake that we wrote a petition to the city about this. So they set up a community meeting to “discuss” it with us. I could tell from the moment I entered the hall how they were going to behave. There were “Keep Off” and “Danger” signs all over the place. They were going to try to intimidate us.

There was an “impartial” facilitator for the meeting – hired by the city. He and then various representative of the city started off with some scaremongering about the safety and unpredictability of the lake. They stated that this was the only lake with such a problem and they didn’t know what caused it. Later they contradicted themselves by stating that there was another lake with the same problem. It was clear that they hadn’t done their homework and were now feeling like they were caught in the headlights of public scrutiny.

They then went on to say that they didn’t know how thick the ice was and that it had to be at least 6 inches thick before they would allow skating. This seemed rather strange as the international standard for safe ice thickness is 3 inches. Furthermore, we had actually bored holes over the lake and found it to be 18 inches thick except near the holes where it was only 8 inches thick. You can drive a truck on 18 inches of ice.

The next year, they did some sampling of the air and lake bed and sent us a letter telling us what we already knew. It was methane from rotting vegetation. They put a barrier around the holes. Everyone thought that was a reasonable solution. The following year, however, they started to revert back to their old habits and cordoned of a tiny portion of the lake at one end for skating. That’s how it sits now.

One has to wonder how their tiny brains work. I expect that they are being driven by some sort of paranoia over being sued if someone was stupid enough to fall in one of the holes. They seem to have forgotten that before electric refrigerators gang of men used to harvest ice from lakes for use in iceboxes. In some places, the ice was sent all over the world. These men would cut out chunks while standing right on the edge of the holes they made. This went on for decades with very few problems. The knowledge of how ice behaves seems to have escaped today’s engineers.

Now, it isn’t so much the gross incompetence displayed by the city staff that ticked the people around the lake. It wasn’t even the lack of knowledge or understanding of the cause or the outright contradictions that we were given. One expects that of city hall. No, it was the heavy handed approach to dealing with the issues that really pissed us off. There was no consultation with property owners before acting and an inappropriate response to the problem in the first place, continuing today.

They tried to tell us that we don’t have a right to skate on the lake. Excuse me? The lake is public property and we, as members of the public, have every right to determine for ourselves what we do or do not have a right to do. What the city and, indeed, every level of government, fail to realise is that, in a democracy, the people are in charge. Get it though your heads. We pay your salaries to do what we want done, not what you want to do to us. That’s why we have elections. It may not be the permanent employees who get the sack if they do something the public get upset about but they have to realise who they ultimately are serving.