This poor guy let the stress of the situation overwhelm him. He had to be told to get out of a car sinking in water and just looked bewildered. It was pretty deep there but the water was only waist deep where the reporter helped him. Dude “just stand up”.
No joke I think this guy would have drowned in waist deep water if that reporter hadn’t helped him.
Quite interesting how humans can just shut down and not function under even short periods of stress. Could happen to anybody and does. There’s always a few drownings anytime the roads flood like that locally.
kudos to the reporter who calmly helped the guy and held onto his microphone.
That’s one of the things I’ve seen repeated in books about survival and self defense. People get caught in this thinking trap of, “How can this be happening?” and don’t react to deal with the situation. The sooner you can break free of that and move to “I need to deal with this,” the greater your odds of survival. This guy just seems dumbfounded that his car is sinking and doesn’t seem to know what to do next.
When people lack the physical ability to get their head above water for whatever reason, drowning isn’t a huge surprise. But when the water isn’t very deep, and one is physically capable, that’s a bit more of a puzzler.
It’s situational awareness. A person is in one situation and is responding correctly to it. But then the situation changes unexpectedly. Most times people realize their situation has changed and switch to a new set of responses that are appropriate to the new situation. But some times people miss the change and keep responding to the new situation as if they were still in the previous situation.
It’s actually part of our survival instinct. We’re constantly being bombarded with information. If we tried to process everything we’d be overwhelmed. So we develop a mental filter than makes us aware of the information that’s important to our current situation while filtering out the irrelevant stuff.
Probably the more common case is where someone is suddenly and unexpectedly submerged and their panic reflex takes over. An example might be walking in the water at the edge of a lake and stepping into a deep hole. The person may gulp water and a primitive part of their brain takes over. Even though they might be able swim just fine, they are unable to think properly and could drown.
I learned pretty early on as a kid that it would be possible to drown in shallow water. One time wading in the ocean, a wave knocked me over and I realized I had two problems. First, it wasn’t obvious to me which way was up. Second, it was a lot harder to get my feet underneath me than I thought. I kept touching the ground, but standing up required getting my feet and my hips under my shoulders and that was harder to do than I would have thought.
That was a mild enough situation that I don’t think anyone would have drowned in it, but it gave me a real respect for water and for how easy it is to get confused or disoriented in an emergency.
I did something to my legs by having them bent in the same position in a kayak for five hours. We paddled the kayak up to shore, my friend wandered off for some perfectly legitimate reason, and I pulled myself out of the kayak. It’s weird expecting your legs to work and having them completely fail. So I flopped into the water, face first. I managed to roll myself over and pull myself up with my arms pushing against the kayak, but my arms were pretty fatigued, too. Would have been sad to have drowned in two feet of water, a foot from my kayak and a few feet from shore.
It’s information overload coupled with disbelief. As others have touched on. Maybe once the water got to his neck he’d have realized that he needed to get out and swim. Then again maybe not.
It’s like the difference between book smarts and street smarts.
A similar scenario of information overload and disbelief: where I live on the San Francisco peninsula, the CalTrain commuter train parallels much of a main north-south road, El Camino Real, between San Francisco and San Jose, cities about 50 miles apart. It makes for many dangerous rail crossings along the train tracks, on congested roads, and a car gets hit every so often.
Once a few years back, a man died in Redwood City because there was a traffic jam going across the tracks. Bumper-to-bumper, stopped traffic, and when the crossbars lowered and the signals rang, his car was right on the track. Stuck between the cars, he couldn’t drive forward or backward.
I suppose he froze. I suppose there wasn’t anyone (like that reporter) at the right spot to yell and snap him out of his trance, “Get out NOW and run! RUN!!!” That poor guy, those were his last few seconds on this earth. Here’s an article about it: Stuck on Caltrain tracks? Flee or die – The Mercury News
From the time the crossbars start lowering and the signals start ringing there are only 20-30 seconds before the train comes, and those trains are moving at 60mph. I think that guy experienced information overload and disbelief, and 20-30 seconds wasn’t enough time for him to realize what to do.
We are all human, it can happen to any of us. Maybe not water or a train, but for each of us some unexpected set of circumstances with possibly tragic outcomes.
Brain freeze, and not the Slurpee variety.
And a bit of trivia, the Slurpee turns 50 this year!
My hometown had a number of railroad crossings. It was pounded into us even before learning to drive that you never drove onto the tracks until there was enough space ahead of you to clear them.
The article you posted had some useful information in addition to the story:
[QUOTE=Mercury News]
But for motorists who find themselves in the same scenario as Isaacson, experts offered this simple advice: Get out of the car and run.
Those who must escape their vehicles should run at an angle in the direction toward the train, said Virginia-based rail safety expert Danny Gilbert.
While that may sound completely counterintuitive, he said, running at the train keeps you out of harm’s way.
When the train hits the car it will go flying. If you run in the same direction that the train is going, you will be in the trajectory of the car or any flying debris produced by the collision, he said.
[/QUOTE]
It makes sense, though I doubt I’d think of it while a train is charging at me.
Yeah, it’s funny, but it’s a nervous laughing-at-death sort of dark funny. Wouldn’t have been funny if the guy got killed but people don’t realize just how fast you can go from driving to drowning in that situation.
As someone who’s run EMS in low-lying areas, I’ve done my share of water rescues.
He was suddenly in a situation that most people have never been in before. His car was all of a sudden floating…sideways, as well as bobbing. Right there many people are at information overload as their car should only go straight (or at least follow the front wheels), not rear first, side to side, or up & down front to back. In aviation terms that would be yaw, pitch, & roll all at the same time. Second, especially in a low car like a Prius, one can spin out of the driver’s seat & have their leg touch the ground with your thigh pretty much parallel to the ground. Once the car is floating, you need to step down further, but because of the color of the water, you can’t see if it’s one inch or one foot further down. This adds to the information overload.
It’s plain by the audio, that he’s having trouble hearing the reporter. He’s also not a very strong swimmer; not sure if that’s the clothes, arthritis, or just not a good swimmer but he’s barely more than doggy paddling his way out.
The windshield wipers are quite possibly due to the electrical systems wigging out upon being submerged.
I’d like to amend chacoguy’s comment down to 6" of fast flowing water is enough to knock someone off their feet…& then pin you against a guardrail / fence by the side of the road. We had one fatal, found the woman ¼ mile downstream from her car when she got out in a flash flood of what is usually a creek.
Finally, I’d like to say the reporter is a flaming asshole! He goes to “save someone’s life” but doesn’t even bother to put down his microphone. In fact he keeps talking to it before he’s completed the rescue. He goes in to get him but only extends one hand/arm while obviously attempting to keep the mic above the water. While still in waist-deep water he starts interviewing him.
Then, after he’s let go of the man’s hand you can watch that they clearly step up onto something like a curb. Done right, he would have maintained contact until they were out of the water because if there was a hubcap, rock, tree stump, etc there than man would have probably tripped & been submerged again, especially with someone of that age who was ‘swimming’ that poorly.
Well, maybe that’s a little extreme. I don’t disagree with your points, but you’re more familiar with how to rescue people, while he’s a reporter who’d like to save the guy but also get a story at the same time. But if the old guy had drowned, then the reporter is an asshole!
I’m an excellent swimmer and was wearing a life vest at the time, but I truly felt like I was going to drown in less than 2’ of water when my raft flipped while white water rafting. I was being dragged along by a swift current and couldn’t get my bearings. My shorts were being pulled off and pulling me down. And while a life vest keeps you above water it doesn’t do anything to keep your face pointed to the sky.
