With so many pictures of vehicles submerged in water or floating down a street, reports of people drowning inside their vehicles, and warnings like ‘Turn around - don’t drown’, why do some people still insist on doing it?
Years ago I-5 by Eugene was under water. I was trying to get home and that was the only route feasible. I knew traffic was getting thru but there were some problems. (Like the semi trailer that fell in a sink hole!) I was in a small Toyota pickup. Traffic was very slow and tho the water covered the roadway you could see the lane striping. I was in the middle lane next to a truck, I stayed right by the rear tandems because I could see the road as he displaced water with the tires. Looking in my rearview mirror I could see EVERYBODY was behind me or him. Maybe it was just the traffic with me that day, but no one took a chance and blasted thru the water.
This isn’t meant as a slam on the victims of floods, I’m sincerely interested in what goes on in someone’s mind that makes them take the chance. Bravado? Desperation? Does your brain shut off the reasoning part because of fear?
I think part of the problem is it doesn’t start off that deep. Then gets deeper, and deeper as you move forward. At that point they feel committed and hope it will start getting shallower again.
Probably a lot of “I’ve driven through water before…and it doesn’t look that deep” thinking. The problem is, it only has to reach the point where the water level forces the engine to cut off, and then it’s a question of whether or not the car is heavy enough to withstand any current.
-how little water depth it takes to disable an engine (either by screwing up the electronics, or by getting enough in the air intake to cause hydraulic locking)
-how little water depth it takes to float a car (at first, before the water gets inside)
-how little water velocity it takes to sweep a car downstream, off of the road and into deeper/more turbulent water
-how difficult it is to extract yourself from a waterborne car, and then extract yourself from deep/wide/turbulent floodwater, especially if you happen to be a shitty swimmer (54 percent of Americans can’t swim)
Many vehicles seen in Houston footage may have been parked for the duration of the storm, contributing to an overinflated sense of how many people actually drove into too-deep water.
A handful of years back I was in Boulder when the flooding started up there. My classmates and I got out of class and were heading back to Denver where we lived. I took a shortcut home gambling that it was more protected from the weather and that was worth not being around other people if I needed to be rescued. My classmates later told me that the road ahead of my short cut was flooded in three places and after they crossed the first one they felt there was no going back so they had to keep crossing the streams in order to get out.
In the end, they were entering the water on the upstream side and trying to go fast enough that they crossed the stream before they were swept off the road. In that case, the fear was that as bad as it was ahead it was worse behind so they had no choice but to keep going. They may have been right because Boulder flooded pretty badly that night but they all made it through. I’m glad I didn’t have to decide.
You just told us why people drive in flood waters. The water looks shallow … enough … and they want to get home. Or get someplace else.
You may be thinking that, either at the time or now, you were exercising excellent judgment and caution. You weren’t. You took a big chance and got lucky. Others take similar chances and are unluckier or take bigger chances and are unwittingly doomed from the git-go.
If your takeaway from that day in Eugene is anything but “never again” you learned the wrong lesson.
It can be very deceptive to look at standing water in a location where you ordinarily don’t see it. Especially when there’s a storm at your back and you don’t know what the alternatives are. Motivated reasoning starts to tell you that your chances are pretty good, so you just plow through. At that point, you gain a very informative and unforgettable life experience.
You also have people who are following or see a larger vehicle cross and figure “My Camry can do that”. Of course… no, it can’t. I saw a van try to follow a semi over a bridge once but stall out once the water came back in from the truck’s wake. Over the next hour, the waters pushed the van off the bridge completely and into the river (and had to be removed a couple days later with a crane).
I did flood a vehicle once because I was on an unfamiliar road trying to avoid the major flooded streets. I stopped at a stop sign on a hill, saw that the street below looked covered but wasn’t aware how flooded it was. By the time I realized I was dunking my hood, it was too late and the car slid into enough water to submerge the hood and start flooding the passenger compartment. That night we pushed it out of the water and got a tow the next day and I was lucky that changing out the fluids and a few other fixes got it running solidly again (no electronics damage).
When we were pushing it out, someone came out of their house to help and said that someone ALWAYS did this when the street flooded because it looked so deceptive.
People do not realize how a relatively shallow amount of water can overpower and move their vehicle if that water is moving. Water is massive and very powerful when moving. Your tires may be tall enough to drive through a standing patch of 6 inches but be over come by the force of that water moving.
Also, with regard to cars, people just don’t understand how they work. Mostly gone are the big old grills with a radiator behind it. Due to better aerodynamics (and big grills are ugly), cars have smaller grills now, instead they use an air dam below the front of the car that directs airflow from under the car and up through the radiator. Late model Pontiacs basically had no grill and the air all was picked up from under the front of the car and directed up. This sort of design would pick up water 4 or 5 inches off the ground and swamp the engine if you hit standing water too fast.
But the movement of the water is the real problem. You think, “hey, I’m in a 3 or 4 thousand pound vehicle and that looks like 6 inches of water, I can just go slow.” Bad idea.
I remember needing to get home and trying every which route, all cut off by flood waters, till I found this one, flooded but a guy on horseback willing to guide me through the shallow sections.
I have also driven though several streams as part of unimproved roadways without bridges. Driving through the stream was part of the road.
I believe the message is wrong, there are safe ways of driving across flooded sections which is done all over the world. The idea that a puddle of water means wait till it dries is not realistic. And there is the problem. It is considered a on off switch, water means no drive. That is unreasonable to the point of stupidity. Which means we are treated as stupid idiots.
We should be taught how to drive through water, and when to back off.
Uh, you just asked “why do people do <X>, it’s crazy” and followed it up with an anecdote about the time you did <X>.
I dispute your claim that “no one took a chance”. You all did. You just got lucky. The difference between you and someone who drowned boils down to luck or perhaps a minor difference in risk assessment. But fundamentally you made the same decision (which answers your question): you judged you could make it through the water, and it stood between you and someplace you wanted to go. You were right and/or lucky, others were wrong and/or unlucky.
I once nearly got caught in a flash flood in the Plaza area of Kansas City. It happens real damned fast. If you’re out driving, you have to go somewhere, and the mind just doesn’t comprehend what has happened. Most likely, you have no experience with this situation, and, as mentioned elsewhere, flooding is deceptive.
I started down a hill that appeared to have a shallow layer of water at the bottom – and realized that there was a car floating in that “shallow” pool.
I was extremely lucky to get home safe that night.
Many years ago, after a tornado in Dallas, I read about a woman who was driving home in the storm with her husband. They came to a low water crossing and she said “I’d better turn around and find another way.” He poo-poo’d the idea and got out of the car. Went and stood in the middle of the road to show her that the water wasn’t that deep. They recovered his body a few days later.
People really don’t believe that it doesn’t take that much water to wash a car off a road.
I think this is another reason along with the others that people have mentioned. People are doing their normal daily business, so have it in their head that they need to get home or get to work or whatever. If they come upon a flooded road, they may think “now how am I going to get home?” Sitting on the side of the road (above the water) for an unknown amount of time until the road clears doesn’t seem like a smart option, so they keep going. Or they can’t think of alternate routes.