Want a really fast and interesting way to kill yourself? Try driving through water of unknown depth… that will do a really good job of (at the very least) destroying your most expensive possession and likely ending your life.
Driving through water: Just say no
Recently, Spice wrote an article called The Prepared Car: Some tips & advice about automobile preps (clicky) in which she described what could instantly nearly turned into a surprise “near death experience”.
She wrote: “It was a dark and stormy night. Salty and I are driving along some generic rural two-lane highway, between one farm field and another, not a creek or even a culvert in sight, halfway up the hill. There’s a sheen of water across the road. We think nothing of it, can’t be more than an inch or two deep in such a spot, right? Then … why’s the car floating across the lanes?!? We’re being washed away! Just before we float clean off the road, we’re across the wash and catch traction. We’re here to tell the story only because there was no oncoming traffic. I’ll never disrespect the power of running water again.”
You would never know it normally…
We’ve driven past that spot in daylight many times since, and we simply cannot imagine how it could have flooded like it did.
Your typical flash flood road chart for North Missouri… each one of the red/white bubbles is a road closed.
Flash floods are a real thing
Water is powerful, and people often underestimate that power.
Don’t.
Once you feel your car starting to float, let me tell you, it’s something you never forget.
Here in North Missouri we have lots of hills and valleys, and we have lots of areas that are prone to flash flooding. Unlike the Mississippi river bottom (which flood when the levees break) most flash flood areas have very little flood control. One inch of water can turn into two feet of water in a second if a temporary tree obstruction upstream or a beaver dam (which are all over the place around here) lets go.
Sometimes we get caught in a flash flood through no fault of our own (like driving at night in an area that has not flooded but that one time in the 35 years I have lived here), but driving through water in a flash flood area is just crazy dangerous.