CLEVELAND — You don't have to look far to find them, people venturing out onto Lake Erie off Edgewater, some literally so far that they're almost difficult to spot.
Leo Lopez watched in disbelief from the pier.
"That's crazy, you know, I mean that's guts, walking on the lake like that, that's guts," he said, not likely to follow in their footsteps. "I don't think so. I mean, you don't know how thick the ice is."
We ran into one man walking on the ice near the pier, taking pictures of the formations.
When asked if being on the ice made him nervous, he said, "I think if I went way out, yes, but this has been frozen for most of the week or more."
But just because the ice may pass the eye test and stretch as far as the eye can see, it doesn't mean it's completely safe, said News 5 Meteorologist Allan Nosoff.
"We're just now entering the stage where the ice is getting thicker, but latest reports show it's not safe yet to do the things that I've been seeing people do out on the lake," Nosoff said.
Cleveland Fire's Tech Rescue 1 is watching them as well. If anything goes wrong on the ice, they are the unit to respond.
"This is our banana boat; it's deployable on ice. It's very lightweight but very rugged," said Firefighter Joe Lipiec, who heads up the unit.
Lipiec said that the extreme cold tends to give people a false sense of security.
"Absolutely, it does," he said. "There are currents under the ice, and you never know what you are stepping out onto or where it begins or ends with snow cover as well. Snow makes it look nice and flat, but it could be jagged rocks, could be anything."
And just because it looks solid, doesn't mean it is, said Nosoff.
"The ice acts like plate tectonics, like the reason why we get earthquakes, because underneath the ice, we still have fluid water, Nosoff said. "So that is going to give way to some movement. There are cracks, we've been seeing cracks, literally pushing from west to east with the wind over the last couple of weeks."
And those ice plates, in a sense, can break off with a shift in those winds.
"We've had ice shelves break off, and we've had rescues out there," said Lipiec. "We're very equipped to handle the situation, but at the end of the day, you should stay off of the ice, keep yourself safe."
