Where Ice Is Thinner
This is the branch's most practical card: a list of places weaker than their surroundings. It's not drawn from experience, but taken from Ukraine's State Emergency Service recommendations — where the service's own wording is more precise than a paraphrase, it's quoted as is.
Where the Water Is Moving
River confluences and stretches with fast current. Current carries away heat and erodes ice from underneath, and none of it shows from above. Outflows belong to the same class: near a point where water enters or leaves a body of water, the ice is weaker. That is how the service puts it — weaker, not necessarily thinner.
Where Something Sticks Out of the Ice
The service names boards, sticks, and other objects frozen into the ice as a separate sign. Bushes and reeds stand on the service's list right alongside them. Ice near vegetation is thinner even when it looks the same.
Where Snow Is Lying
Snowdrifts and patches under a thick layer of snow. The service states the rule without exceptions: under snow, ice is always thinner. That's also what makes snow the most dangerous of the signs — it doesn't mark a weak spot, it hides it, along with color and cracks.
Where the Color Differs
Different coloring of the ice on neighboring patches is direct grounds not to go out. It means the ice froze differently here: from different water, at a different time, or on top of snow.
Where People Have Already Stood
Ice crossings — no holes are drilled there at all. A spot with many holes drilled close together, and a group of people on a small patch, are both on the service's list. Ice weakened by someone else's activity still looks solid, and it's the same trap as with snow.
How Far From Shore
This is no longer an item from the service's list but simple arithmetic of distance. The farther the spot is from shore, the longer it takes someone already wet to get back, and the longer it takes someone on shore to reach them. A hole that takes a long walk costs more than it looks.
What's Done About It
They're avoided, not tested. A stick tests the path — but a stick answers "does it hold here," not "does it hold farther on." The other half of the signs is about time, and without it this list is incomplete: the same spot can be solid one week and empty the next. What to bring — a separate card.