Posted on 09/01/2012 6:09:18 PM PDT by WXRGina
JACKSON COUNTY -- Parker Isaacson and Chesney Cummins had no idea that playing in the swift-running water that was draining off Wolf Ridge Road in their neighborhood Thursday could cost them their lives.
They saw it as the best place to ride their inner tubes.
The water was more than a foot or two deep at the intersection of Wolf Ridge and Timber Ridge Drive in the Three Rivers community. It was running high and strong and it was swirling swiftly in one spot. All the more fun.
But what was causing the swirl was a culvert they couldn't see beneath the water that had been installed by the county for drainage.
(Excerpt) Read more at sunherald.com ...
This story reads like a horror adventure movie!
Oh my Good Lord! That would scare the absolute Hell out of me.
I cannot believe they lived either.
Just reading the story made me gasp for air!
I am glad they survived their adventure but there was no hurricane Isaac. It was a tropical storm.
Were they new to the area and ignorant of the presence of the culvert? Did they have no clue that rapid water in the middle of seeming nowhere had to be going somewhere?
Even relatively still waters could hide a situation like a manhole cover that had earlier washed off, and a wader in the area could find himself in a watery grave by surprise. But moving waters? Well it’s fortunate that they lived.
Dude, I almost drowned in a creek this year. Water is dangerous, that’s all I can say.
At least in a creek if you could swim you’d likely end up OK. (They say if you get caught in a rip tide at the ocean shore, swim parallel to the shore rather than trying to fight it at that spot.) Falling into the entrance of a strongly flowing drain pipe... fat lot of good swimming would do you. You would have to pray a prayer like Jonah in the belly of the fish. They were very fortunate it wasn’t plugged with debris that would have kept them from coming out the end.
Somebody alert Mr. Rogers. It seems you can get sucked down the drain.
Still waters run deep ping
Isaac qualified as a hurricane for a little more than 24 hours.
Yes, it was tropical storm strength over here in Mississippi with wind gusts only into the 60 mph range (it went right over our heads where we live right off the beach in Gulfport--hundreds of tornadoes and all), but it's "official name," as it was sitting over us for more than a day, is Hurricane Isaac.
Regardless, this is an amazing story.
We were here when Katrina hit and wiped out the Mississippi Gulf Coast, so--yes--we know what a damned hurricane is.
Oh, so fast I missed it.
It doesn’t even need a hurricane to drop enough H2O to get flooding, fully flowing culverts, and the like. I saw it happen in Chicago, in 1989.
1989 ... er, make that 1987. Old fogie memory.
Right! The point is the 12 to 15+ inches of rain that fell on this area (in Louisiana, they got closer to 2 feet of rain).
Yep, no kidding.
When I was a kid I had a dream that I got stuck in an underwater cave at a river my parents took us swimming at over the summer. I remember during the dream I couldn’t breathe. Terrible nightmare.
When I read this that dream immediately returned to my mind. Trapped in the dark with nothing but water...now that is a primal fear.
Oh, Chris, the nightmares can be so vivid and long-lingering!
Primal, indeed!
Darwin Award runners up. It’s not often that someone does something that stupid and survives.
His mother had warned them not to play around there but they didn't listen. He was only involved because he tried to rescue the girl.
We see similar stories during a lot of thunderstorm/flash-flood scenarios and during hurricane stories. They don’t always have the same happy ending, but it seems that folks never learn from the mistakes of others and so it goes on...
Praise God they lived through their adventure.
Glad I never did anything perilously fun and stupid. /s
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