More than 100 people rescued from ice floe that broke free in Minnesota
Over 100 people were rescued from an ice floe that broke free from a fishing area along the shore of Upper Red Lake in Minnesota on Friday evening, authorities said.
The Beltrami County Sheriff’s Office reported that 122 individuals were taken to safety, with four of them having fallen into the icy waters during an earlier rescue attempt using a canoe.
“They were brought back to the ice floe to warm in a fishing shelter,” the sheriff’s office said in a statement.
First responders received the first call of people stranded on the ice floe just before 5 p.m., and by 7:37 p.m. all people on the floe had been rescued, the sheriff’s office said.
Multiple agencies responded to the emergency, and no injuries were reported.
Temperatures in the area were as low as 15 and as high as 38 on Friday, with wind chill pulling the day’s warmest hours down into the low 30s, according to National Weather Service data. The weather was reported as fair to partly cloudy, with mostly clear skies, conditions favored for ice fishing.
However, the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources Enforcement Division has warned anglers and others that ice thickness has been wildly inconsistent this season, especially in the north.
“Conditions are extremely uneven and changing frequently,” it said on Facebook on Thursday. “Ice conditions will remain poor until there’s a string of cold days to form new, clear ice.”
Upper Red Lake is in the Red Lake Indian Reservation in Northern Minnesota.