Public safety officials warn against walking on Pittsburgh's frozen rivers
As ice continues to build on Pittsburgh's three rivers, people are taking the risk of walking across the ice despite warnings from public safety officials and scientists.
Around 6 p.m. on Saturday, a few individuals could be seen walking from the North Shore to Point State Park. Others took pictures with a navigation buoy. In both cases, officers and park rangers encouraged people to come to shore. The situation kept repeating like a game of icy Whac-A-Mole.
Around the same time, on the river by the Mr. Rogers statue, Jermaine and Ashton, two men in their early 20s who didn't want to give their last names, sprinted across the ice, dropping on their stomachs to continue sliding.
"It's an adrenaline rush," one of them said. "We're having fun."
Also on the ice was a family, including two young children.
"We're having a great time seeing the frozen river," the father said. "If there was nobody here, I wouldn't have dared to come this far, even."
Despite acknowledging she was scared, the mother said they did it anyway.
While not necessarily illegal, National Weather Service Pittsburgh meteorologist Jason Frazier said walking on the ice amounts to taking a dangerous risk.
"It's definitely something we discourage," Frazier said. "What people don't maybe realize is that while the ice appears like it's nice and solid, maybe thick, the thickness can actually be very different in a lot of different places of the river.
Ice thickness ranged from six inches to one inch to spots without ice, Frazier said. Unlike a lake, he said, rivers have a moving current underneath, which leads to varying thicknesses.
"If you actually do find a crack that's maybe because of snow cover, you could fall in and be transported away from the spot you fall in," Frazier said.
Both groups KDKA-TV spoke with had the same line of thinking about why they were safe, saying they stayed close to the shore where the water was shallow. That was more the case for the family than it was for the two young men.
"We can still say that there are dangers even on those shoreline areas," Frazier said.
Both are due to friction on the shorelines that disrupts ice formation and snow covering cracks in the ice, and if you fall in, even there, consider the water temperature is at or below freezing.
First responders are also at risk when people go on ice because they could get called in for a rescue, Frazier said.
Around 9:30 Saturday night, yet another person was walking in the middle of the Allegheny, roughly from the Fort Duquesne to the Clemente bridges.