Thin ice spells double trouble for persistent Swedish motorist
Things didn’t go as planned for a 42-year-old man when he tried to retrieve his car after it crashed through the ice on a lake near Lidköping in central Sweden.
The man had driven his car out onto the lake near a marina around 10pm on Saturday night, only to have the ice give way, leaving his vehicle partially submerged in the shallow waters a few hundred metres off shore, the Nya Lidköpings-Tidningen reports.
Desperate for a way to extract his car from the lake’s icy waters, the man decided to borrow a wheel loader from his workplace in hopes of being able to tow his car back to shore.
But when the man drove the piece of heavy construction equipment onto the ice shortly after midnight, it too crashed through the lake’s ice, which once again proved to be too thin to support the weight of a heavy vehicle.
Elsewhere in Sweden, a man on a snowmobile went through the ice on a lake outside of Luleå in northern Sweden. While the man escaped without injury, he was nevertheless taken to hospital for observation, the TT news agency reports.
And a car carrying an elderly couple also went through the ice when they tried to take a short cut over the frozen Östra Geasjön lake to a cabin on the island of Storholmen outside of Ljusdal in northern Sweden, according to the Aftonbladet newspaper.
Before embarking on their ill-fated journey, the man had drilled through the ice the test its thickness, but his faulty judgment resulted in his car breaking through the ice just 20 metres off shore.
The man and his wife, both in their seventies, managed to get themselves and their dog out of the sinking car without injury.
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The man had driven his car out onto the lake near a marina around 10pm on Saturday night, only to have the ice give way, leaving his vehicle partially submerged in the shallow waters a few hundred metres off shore, the Nya Lidköpings-Tidningen reports.
Desperate for a way to extract his car from the lake’s icy waters, the man decided to borrow a wheel loader from his workplace in hopes of being able to tow his car back to shore.
But when the man drove the piece of heavy construction equipment onto the ice shortly after midnight, it too crashed through the lake’s ice, which once again proved to be too thin to support the weight of a heavy vehicle.
Elsewhere in Sweden, a man on a snowmobile went through the ice on a lake outside of Luleå in northern Sweden. While the man escaped without injury, he was nevertheless taken to hospital for observation, the TT news agency reports.
And a car carrying an elderly couple also went through the ice when they tried to take a short cut over the frozen Östra Geasjön lake to a cabin on the island of Storholmen outside of Ljusdal in northern Sweden, according to the Aftonbladet newspaper.
Before embarking on their ill-fated journey, the man had drilled through the ice the test its thickness, but his faulty judgment resulted in his car breaking through the ice just 20 metres off shore.
The man and his wife, both in their seventies, managed to get themselves and their dog out of the sinking car without injury.
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