Eight tourists recently received tickets at Scarborough Bluffs, Canada, after ignoring warning signs and climbing over a fence to get a better view across Lake Ontario. The visitors were spotted by a police officer, who rounded them up and reprimanded them for trespassing.
The incident (which you can watch below) was recorded by real estate attorney David Feld, and shared on Instagram account TouronsOfYellowstone, which highlights examples of bad behavior at National Parks and other sites of natural beauty.
"You could all be arrested now because you're trespassing," the officer tells the visitors. "This is no joke. Line up over here, or I'll call a police car, put you in the back seat of the police car, and you'll go to the station. This is absolutely nuts."
Some of the tourists claim they were unfamiliar with the area, while standing directly behind signs warning about the unstable bluffs, and others claimed they thought it was OK because they could see others already standing there,
The Bluffs, which are accessible via a clifftop trail, stretch for around 15k along the shore of Lake Ontario, and are a popular sightseeing spot for visitors. However, they are continually eroding, with material from the Bluffs drifting away to make up the Toronto Islands spit system, making the edge unstable.
High waters and heavy rainfall increase the rate of erosion, and can lead to dangerous landslides. During a particularly wet spring in 2017, Canadian news site Global News reported that there were between 15 and 17 landslides within the space of two months.
“What people don’t realize is that so much of the Bluffs are undermined and they don’t realize that there’s nothing holding them up. It’s just grass essentially,” said Nancy Gaffney, watershed specialist at the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority (TRCA),
A report from Global News includes footage of tourists on the edge of the Bluffs that year, gathering to take photos for social media despite warnings from the TRCA that the area is unsafe.
"I think because there are other people there, it seems safer" says one visitor.
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