"You sound like my mom..... My camera was safely cradled on the dashboard, with both hands on the steering wheel."

December 4, 2009 4:03 PM

My drive to work in the rainstorm 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Footage of a drive through the June 7 2008 rainstorm on the North portion of Tung Chung Road on Lantau Island in Hong Kong. On that day Hong Kong experienced 307mm of rain and 130mm the previous day. That is more than 17 inches of rain in 48 hours.

posted by defenestration (40 comments total)

How did he pass the bus with the light pole knocked over on it?
posted by anazgnos at 4:07 PM on December 4, 2009 [4 favorites]

Seems to me that unless your job is testing out Penthouse Pets and single-malts, it isn't worth going through this for.
posted by turgid dahlia at 4:10 PM on December 4, 2009

There is a fundamental glitch in the human brain that incorrectly convinces people it is totally a good idea to drive through moving water of unknown depth.

anazgnos- He went under the lightpole, he says it in the comments.
posted by fshgrl at 4:14 PM on December 4, 2009 [1 favorite]

Death Wish 3: The Drowning
posted by netbros at 4:27 PM on December 4, 2009 [1 favorite]

Well that looks really foolhardy.
posted by nola at 4:31 PM on December 4, 2009

Clearly the "don't drive through flooded roads" PSA campaign in Hong Kong wasn't effective.
posted by birdherder at 4:36 PM on December 4, 2009

There's a joke about French Canadian drivers in here somewhere.
posted by Decimask at 4:42 PM on December 4, 2009

The guy is an airline pilot. You think his driving is bad. Maudit tabarouette.
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 5:05 PM on December 4, 2009 [1 favorite]

Minouche!
posted by maudlin at 5:16 PM on December 4, 2009

I think people sometimes expecting great praise for their devotion to the job - in fact it can earn them great criticism for risking so much.
posted by uni verse at 5:34 PM on December 4, 2009

"Not so crazy, I was going nice and slow. Ha ha!"

Nope. Still crazy.
posted by schwa at 5:36 PM on December 4, 2009 [1 favorite]

this guy was either driving a tank or is an idiot...
posted by HuronBob at 5:47 PM on December 4, 2009

For some reason, those videos reminded me of this . . . a driving video as well, but in all other ways quite a lot different than the above videos.
posted by flug at 6:10 PM on December 4, 2009

There is a fundamental glitch in the human brain that incorrectly convinces people it is totally a good idea to drive through moving water of unknown depth.

Especially if they are driving an SUV or jacked-up truck.

This reminds me of the heavy rains Santa Barbara had a few years back- the drains in the underpasses quickly overloaded, and the underpasses started filling up. The thing is, people kept driving into the underpasses, confident that their 4X4s would do just fine...until the water went over the engine block. In the end the water was over 12 feet deep, and nearly all the trucks and SUVs were completely submerged.
posted by happyroach at 6:44 PM on December 4, 2009

I wouldn't have been surprised if the comment on the video was "So, here are a series of videos we found on a camera belonging to the deceased occupant of a car washed into floodwaters".
posted by tomble at 7:05 PM on December 4, 2009

Dude. Turn around! Don't drown!
posted by freshwater_pr0n at 7:10 PM on December 4, 2009

How did he pass the bus with the light pole knocked over on it?

Cheat code.
posted by zardoz at 7:11 PM on December 4, 2009 [3 favorites]

Eeeaaah....... I would have been more comfortable watching those if he'd included a shot of whatever tank he's driving.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 7:22 PM on December 4, 2009

He was driving a Subaru Forester.
posted by pinky at 7:48 PM on December 4, 2009 [1 favorite]

Hope the people at the retirement home are ok.

/ponyo
posted by Space Kitty at 8:09 PM on December 4, 2009 [1 favorite]

There is a fundamental glitch in the human brain that incorrectly convinces people it is totally a good idea to drive through moving water of unknown depth.

Depth doesn't even matter if the water is moving fast enough. In a flash flood, things start getting bad at around six inches of water, and a foot or two is enough to float pretty much any car or truck.
posted by burnmp3s at 9:06 PM on December 4, 2009 [1 favorite]

Eeeek. Having grown up in the desert, I'm very much afraid of floodwaters... you couldn't pay me to try to cross that. Guess he hasn't heard that ditches are deadly!
posted by vorfeed at 9:10 PM on December 4, 2009 [1 favorite]

this guy was either is driving a tank or hummer and is an idiot...
posted by mattoxic at 9:14 PM on December 4, 2009

There's a joke about French Canadian drivers in here somewhere.

Should've know you were Ontarian. Sti d'tête carrée de cul, tu peux aller te faire mettre.
posted by splice at 9:52 PM on December 4, 2009

Burnmp3's has it. It doesn't take deep water to make driving through it dangerous.

I own a Jeep Wrangler and there is no way I would have driven through that. Not even if I had a 6" lift and big ass mud tires. That water was moving very fast.
posted by robtf3 at 10:03 PM on December 4, 2009

I remember that storm - there were a couple of villages on Lantau that were cut off by road for days. Even on Hong Kong island there were some slips. The ground floor of my apartment building was coated in 4 inches of mud.
posted by awfurby at 10:32 PM on December 4, 2009

In these conditions I would drive so fast that the water would evaporate beneath my tires. Just saying . . ..
posted by Partial Panel at 10:43 PM on December 4, 2009 [2 favorites]

I would drive faster than Partial Panel toward home where I would stay until all that water receded.
posted by Cranberry at 11:37 PM on December 4, 2009

Part 1, OK, the water's fast, but maybe he can still see the yellow line and it's not deep. I can't tell because of the video quality.

...

Part 3. No, no, no. No way, no how. At least there's a guard rail to catch him if he goes sideways.
posted by zippy at 12:36 AM on December 5, 2009

There's a joke about French Canadian drivers in here somewhere.

Onward!
posted by The Whelk at 5:33 AM on December 5, 2009

When I heard the voice and it was a bloke, I was less than astonished.
posted by hawthorne at 5:46 AM on December 5, 2009

A quote from the poster: "It was only rain falling, hardly life threatening stuff."

Yeah. Not surprised this is a guy, at all.

He was driving a Subaru Forester AWD, and I'm trying to decide whether Subaru would be proud or horrified by this vid.
posted by longdaysjourney at 6:12 AM on December 5, 2009

Small thread derail: I'd like to thank splice for furthering my education in Quebec French profanity. My rusty French gave me the gist of your remark, but filling in the detail has been most amusing.
posted by Diablevert at 6:17 AM on December 5, 2009 [1 favorite]

Sti head of square ass, you can go to save.
Sometimes things make no sense but I like them anyway.
posted by swell at 8:16 AM on December 5, 2009

It amuses me that thinking having both hands on the wheel is going to make any difference whatsoever to his ability to avert disaster. It doesn't really matter how good your ability to steer is when your wheels aren't touching the ground, or when the ground collapses because the water flow underneath has undermined it (as is clearly already happening in several places just on the first two videos.

No job can justify that risk, and while the experience must have been awesome and 'once in a lifetime' it's probably only the 'once' because you tend to die from that sort of thing...
posted by Brockles at 8:28 AM on December 5, 2009

It's interesting to note that he is always traveling downhill and downstream in the videos. I'd like to see the videos of the drive back uphill when he realizes he's not going to make it into work that day.
posted by birdwatcher at 9:50 AM on December 5, 2009 [1 favorite]

In Arizona, we've got gullies and arroyos which are bone-dry 99% of the time, and catastrophically flooded the other one percent. Obviously, we build roads across them rather than over them, because hey, 99% uptime is good for just about anything, plus bridges are expensive.

When it rains, there are signs around these crossings that say not to cross if there's water in them.

Of course, people ignored them frequently, resulting in the local rescue services having to come and retrieve another individual, or family, from the top of their vehicle. Which was, of course, surrounded by the raging waters of a flash flood.

This happened with enough frequency that they passed a law allowing the state to charge the drivers for the cost of their rescue.

It's called the Stupid Motorist Law.
posted by MrVisible at 9:52 AM on December 5, 2009 [4 favorites]

The guy was driving a Subaru Forester. He might as well have been driving a tank.

I could see doing the same thing in my Forester. Especially 'cause mines almost certainly 100x more bagged-out than his was (after that stunt, I'm sure his back end is beat to complete shit.)
posted by five fresh fish at 10:27 AM on December 5, 2009

Mind, that's the sort of hell-bent attitude that keeps me from buying myself a macho truck. I'd just end up regretting some stupid thing I'd done in it. Provided I lived to regret it.
posted by five fresh fish at 10:29 AM on December 5, 2009

I've been to Hong Kong once in my life for a mere 24 hours. As chance would have it, I was there the day he filmed this.
posted by The Ultimate Olympian at 7:16 AM on December 7, 2009 [1 favorite]