Dozens of people had to be rescued after a massive chunk of ice broke away off the shore of Green Bay, Wisconsin. A group of 34 people was ice fishing near Point Comfort on Green Bay when the ice cracked and started floating away towards Lake Michigan.
One of the trapped fishermen told WLUK that it sounded like a gunshot when the ice separated.
"It sounded like, almost, somebody fired a gun out there," Shane Nelson told the news station. "We thought it was interesting, got out of our shanty, took a look, and people were yelling on the ice 'we're separating.'"
Nelson said it was his first-time ice fishing, and it didn't go as he had hoped.
"Didn't catch any fish, ran out of propane early, and got stranded on the ice," he said.
The U.S. Coast Guard and the Brown County Sheriff's Office dispatched airboats that were able to rescue eight people at a time. It took them about 90 minutes to evacuate everybody off the ice, which had floated about a mile away from the shore.
There were no reports of injuries.
The Sherrif's Office is working to determine what caused the ice to dislodge and suggested that a barge traveling through the bay was the likely culprit.