Drivers continue to die on flooded roads
Christina Thompson was joking when she texted her dad last month after days of unrelenting thunderstorms near his rural southern Missouri home: “Are you getting washed away?”
She didn’t realize that hours earlier, the 69-year-old retiree had been swept to his death as he tried to cross a flooded patch of road to get home. William Floyd’s body was found five days later, still in his 2009 Kia Spectra, which was wedged onto a log with only its bumper and rear tires visible.
“Why would he do that?” Thompson asked of her father’s ill-fated decision to drive through the water. “I was just wondering, ‘What was he thinking?’ My dad was smarter than that. It just didn’t make sense.”
Such tragedies are all too common. Despite public service announcements, warning signs, barriers and even gates at floodprone crossings, the majority of flood deaths in America involve people trying to drive through water on flooded roads.
“It is frustrating,” said Todd Shea, warning co-ordinator meteorologist for the National Weather Service in La Crosse, Wis. “It gets back to human
nature. Sometimes you look at these cases and you just have to shake your head.”
Data compiled by Shea shows that 595 Americans have died in floodwater since 2011. A few fell into rivers or drowned while fishing on flooded waterways. And some children died playing too close to high water. But 61 per cent of victims died in vehicles, often after driving around barriers or ignoring signs warning them to turn back.
Texas, with its vast rural areas and many waterways, has had more flood-related deaths than any other state since 2011. Nim
Kidd, chief of the Texas Division of Emergency Management, said too many people underestimate the power of water and “think emergencies and disasters happen to somebody else.”
Kidd was involved in countless water rescues earlier in his career when he was a firefighter in San Antonio.
“We would ask people, ‘Why did you drive around a barricade?’ or, ‘Why did you drive into the water?”’ he said. “The No. 1 answer was, ‘I didn’t know any other way to get to where I was going.’ We’ve got to change that mindset.”