Name: Fall through ice? Here's how to save yourself or someone else
Uploaded: 2026-01-31T09:23:13.000Z
Duration: 4 min 11 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Past simple

So if you were to ever go through the ice into the cold water, we talk about the 110:1 pretty principle.

And 110:1 stands for 1 minute, 10 minutes and then 1 hour.

Gerund

And what that means is the first minute you really want to just think about not drowning.

the problem is that if you fall into cold water, it's instinctual to maybe gasp and to start breathing really quickly and some people might panic.

So we say that that first minute you should just focus on slowing down your breathing, controlling your breathing, keeping your head above the water.

Next, the 10 minutes has to do with the 10 minutes where you're going to be capable of doing a self rescue.

And so after 10 minutes, your cells and your muscles and your nerve cells are going to make it impossible.

They're going to get too cold for you to maybe self rescue.

But you have some time where it could be possible to self rescue.

So what you want to do during those 10 minutes is first make your way back to where you fell in.

So if there was a hole in the ice, if you keep going to the other side, you may be trying to self rescue onto weaker ice.

So you want to turn around and come back towards where you fell in.

Then what you want to do is get your hands up on the surface onto the ice and get your feet out behind you onto the surface as well.

If your feet are hanging down, then you have to do a big like pull up to get yourself over.

But if your feet are behind you, you really just have to scooch your chest and your abdomen onto the ice.

So get your hands and you could do a few kind of bobs and then pull your chest onto the ice and then turn yourself diagonal.

As you're pulling, kick with your legs a little bit to try to get a little further up.

And then turn yourself sideways or diagonal and roll away from the ice.

And the reason for that is if you were to stand up again right away, all your weight is focused on your foot or your feet and you're more likely to break through.

Whereas if you roll away, then you're, you're spreading your weight out and the ice can hold a lot more of your weight.

Let's say you're out and you're traveling on ice, or you are skiing, snowmobiling, ice fishing, anything like that, and

You really don't want to get wet while you're rescuing them because then both of you are going to be at risk for hypothermia and so you would more likely prioritize techniques where you're going to stay dry as a rescuer.

So that would be things like staying on the solid ice yourself and maybe throwing a rope or using a reaching device to extend out.

Maybe you could throw, you know, an extension cord that's not plugged in or just any piece of rope that you find around to try to give them something to hold on to.

And then encourage them to kind of kick as you pull them out.

And then once they get closer to the edge of the ice and you're pulling them over the surface, you actually don't want them to stand up right away.

So you want to either keep pulling them or you want to instruct them to roll away from the weak ice, and

The next thing to do, again, depends on your setting.

If you're more remote, would be to maybe encourage them to go on their back with their legs in the air and drain the water out of their boots, because you've got them out now.

But what we don't want are two giant blocks of ice for their feet.

So I would try to think about drying them off as quickly as possible and then getting to a safer area and then assessing the situation.

They're most likely going to be really cold, so that's where hopefully, you have some way to give them some food, give them some insulation, and

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Fall through ice? Here's how to save yourself or someone else

obvious

prioritize

situation

panic