Concerns Raised About Prospect Park's Ice Rescue Ladders

As temperatures drop and Prospect Park Lake is icing over, two park visitors have raised concerns about whether the rescue ladders placed along the lake would be usable in a rescue attempt.

The rescue stations each have one ladder, but a safe rescue also requires a rope, and, in tricky situations, the use of two ladders hooked together, according to videos of a Parks Department ice-rescue training.

During a walk around the lake Tuesday with Ed Bahlman, who visits the park almost every morning with Anne-Katrin Titze, Patch saw that most of the ladders were missing the piece used to hook two ladders together. Only four of the 14 ladders Patch looked at were intact. At one of the stations, the ladder was missing.

However, a Parks Department spokesman said that the ladders are only supposed to be used by Park personnel, who will show up with rope and life preservers. He added that the ladders are inspected daily and any that are found to be broken will be replaced.

But to Titze and Bahlman, the ladders should have been replaced a long time ago. They said they saw the missing parts on more than half of the lake's ladders on Dec. 17, the day after they were put out.

“The ladders we saw broken were put out broken, and they’re still broken three weeks later,” Bahlman said.

Last year,  after chasing a bird onto the frozen water; in 2004 a man was presumed dead after falling through the ice at Prospect Park Lake and rescue workers were unable to find his body in the water; and in 2003 someone fell through the lake’s ice and survived.

More people walk out onto the ice then you might expect. Titze once on a single morning last winter.

When it snows, it’s . And last year the Parks Department took some heat for not plowing the paths around the water's edge.