Dawn,

Ok...here's my flood experience, first I'll tell you we laugh about this now but clearly didn't at the time, and we definitely didn't tell anybody about it for a long time as we felt like the biggest fools for doing such a stupid thing.

It was 2004 or 2005 and we had a bad storm, so me and mike went driving around afterward to check out the town as we had a huge rainfall, not sure how much. I don't remember seeing quite that much water around town before. The water was coming to the point it was nearly coming on to the road from under the little bridge in town. A couple of streets you didn't dare tuen onto because it looked to deep. Then we made the brilliant decision to drive the outskirts of town and check out the bridge out there. We rounded the corner by my moms house that grew up in and came to water. Mike looked at me said what do you think? I said I can't imagine that it would be very deep. I had walked and jogged down that road since I was a teenager. So we proceeded forward. (big sigh)...oh, the things fail to notice... I never noticed before how much lower the road was compared to the land on one side. Before we had time to stop it was too late, the water was way too high and I was screaming go back and mike said we can't the engine will stall if I stop. We went along with the water probably half way up the pickup for what would be several blocks...then it rose to the hood of the pick up when we got to the bridge.....then it started coming over the hood about the time we were next to the sewer pond , and I'm not exaggerating. I don't swim and was frigging hysterical at that point. The water was maybe an inch or 2 below my window and headlights under water so you couldn't see much. We did see a lot if debris though lawnchairs and various debris washed from peoples yards. At one point I looked over and saw a hot water heater bobbing along outside my window and I was so traumatized that I forgot about that until mike said something about it about a month later. All I could think about was we were going to be pushed off into the sewer pond and would be fished out the next day, and we would be examples for centuries to come. We drove along in that depth of water for probably the length of a couple of blocks and drove out to dry road right after and stopped for a second in disbelief that engine never stalled then headed back to town, both suffering from post traumatic stress neither one of noticed the dragging noise behind us. We got to main street and a kid flashed us over and said hey your dragging your waterhose behind you. Mike said Oh thanks...hmm don't know how that got there and got and threw it in the back of the pickup. It was obviously some of the debris that got d

donated to us from the flood water. Mike repairs engines on oilrigs and has had to cross water before to get there but he said he had never crossed water that deep nor had he ever been that worried.

When I was in college at alva, well scratch that. I was going to tell a story that wasnt as fortunate as ours, but better not. Maybe a lot of people who read this forum from this rural area and it was a really sad thing that happened. Let's just say mike and I both knew better, but because we so familiar with sewer pond road, we thought it was ok, and it clearly was not!! Will always follow that rule not to cross water on a roadway ever again as we can testify to why it's not a good idea!

Sheri,

Thanks for sharing your story. I suspect we've all done something 'silly' and ignored the potential risk only to ask ourselves later "what were we thinking?". Y'all learned an important lesson and one you can share with others, so it was not a wasted experience.

Y'all were incredibly lucky, I think, that the engine didn't stall. Somebody was looking out for you.

I know that only 6" of moving water can sweep a car off a roadway. That seems crazy, doesn't it?

We are in the Red River Valley so our county has lots of low spots, and the predictable spots flood every time. There's a certain point where the water is high enough that we just stay home because we have to drive through high water on our road either to our north or to our south.

One year, our firefighters were responding to the fire station during a period of flash flooding. I told DH and DS to go without me because there was no way I was going out on our road while it was flooding. To make a long story short, our son's car disappeared from the roadway and other firefighters feared he'd been swept away. They found his car pulled off at a crossroad a minute later. I was so relieved. He had driven into high water (only a foot of water) and his engine stalled because it was a small car. They left his car by the side of the road and went on to the fire station so they could go out and shut down roads. During that minute or two that I thought he'd been swept away, I was your typical panicky mom.

He's a professional firefighter now and has had even more training in high water rescue techniques and other related stuff. I hope that means he would not drive himself into high water again, but I think he would do it if he was on his way to go rescue someone else or to respond to a fire call.

Dawn