It’s been a banner week for rescue stories so far, which always inspires mixed emotions. On the one hand, seeing as how they are about people being rescued, they have happy endings. But on the other hand, you lament that a person needed rescuing in the first place.

Such as the story Tuesday morning of a man in crisis who climbed a retaining wall next to the 40-kilometre-per-hour current of the Niagara River, threw himself into the water, and was swept over the Canadian Horseshoe Falls. That is a sad and disturbing story — and no less so because what happened next is astonishing and joyful.

When rescuers began searching the lower basin they found the man sitting on some rocks near the Journey Behind the Falls tourist attraction, having suffered injuries that were not life-threatening. If you have observed the falls firsthand, you cannot help but be amazed someone could survive going over — and was conscious and sitting up, no less.

(In an interesting coincidence, this occurred 59 years to the day after the first recorded instance of a person surviving an unprotected plunge over the falls, Global News reports, when a 7-year-old boy in a life jacket lived through a trip over.)

These are stories that begin in tragedy and end in relief, amazement, and hope that treatment will help heal mental and physical wounds.

Read more:

Two teenagers rescued from Scarborough Bluffs after getting stuck

The old Scarborough Double-Bluff: Man lures firefighters to park, then tries to steal their truck

Two women removed from Scarborough Bluffs in ‘extraordinarily dangerous’ rescue operation

There’s a different trajectory — and an all-too-familiar one — to the week’s other local rescue-beat item. Like, from bafflement to relief to annoyance bordering on anger.

Sunday night, two teenagers were rescued from the Scarborough Bluffs after climbing them and getting stuck 20 feet from the top. Firefighters had to rappel down from the top to get them. Now, it’s good news that they were safely helped — full stop.

But boy howdy, wouldn’t it be swell if we didn’t need to do this so often? We shouldn’t need to. The Scarborough Bluffs are spectacularly beautiful, from the top or the bottom. White cliffs stretching along kilometres of the Lake Ontario shoreline, with parkland at places along the top and more parkland and beaches along the bottom. But they are unstable, and are in fact eroding and crumbling gradually on their own. The material that forms them has a rocky white appearance but is in fact sand and clay. It is not good for climbing.

What do you think?

This was obvious enough to me even as a high school student, when I spent a good portion of my waking hours within a few hundred metres of the top of the bluffs. My high school’s campus backed onto them, and a good portion of our evening and weekend social life involved wandering around — often sipping from mickey bottles of rum — at the top of them and attending parties in the parkland scattered across the edge.

Even then, as irresponsible teenagers, even half in the can a good portion of the time, it was obvious enough to us to stay off the bluffs. They’re incredibly steep, and they fall apart.

But obviously that is not obvious enough. This is not the first rescue there that has made the news this year. And we see these stories every year. In 2018, according to an information campaign launched by the City of Toronto, there were 16 “rescue incidents” on the bluffs.

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These are expensive and time consuming, and divert emergency resources from the kind of work dealing with accidents and unforeseeable emergencies most of us hope paramedics and firefighters will be available to respond to. The city’s campaign says that those 16 rescues last year involved 413 firefighters and 25 paramedic units. Together, they spent over 409 person-hours in the rescue attempts (more than 10 full standard work weeks). The average rescue call drew eight fire trucks and three ambulance units. This is a massive drain on resources to deal with situations that are almost all completely avoidable.

This isn’t complicated, people. Don’t climb the bluffs. Why would you climb the bluffs? Don’t do it. Stay away from the edge, like the signs tell you, because you know the edge might collapse.

It’s true at the top, it’s true at the bottom: They’re nice for looking at, not nice for climbing on. Really. We’ve have enough stories of attempted rescues. We don’t need more. Especially given the risk that the next one might not have a happy ending.