Prayers up.
Prayers up.
You NEVER enter flood water with a vehicle unless you don’t mind drowning.
YIKES!
There is a natural assumption that a military vehicle is ‘somehow’ immune from natural disasters. A good idea is to inform relatively clueless troops that Mother Nature RULES and ignoring her dangers is a VERY BAD MOVE!
RIP for the dead and prayers for the missing!
FYI: I have not heard recently about the Texas Drought, has it ended?
Flash floods happen all the time in Texas. There are low water crossings in west Texas on US Highways.
Where this happened there’s not a lot of places heavy rain can go so the creeks back up and become raging rivers.
There are some gully washers at Ft. Hood. I broke an M-60 tank driving off a washout somewhere on the East Range road.
CVN-69 USS Dwight D. Eisenhower got under way for 7 months just this morning fighting our WAR with ISIS in the middle east.
Blue Angels crash kills one.
Thunderbird crash today..................
Eagles UP!
Prayers UP !!
Old bung hole has sure made a mess of things
Women drivers? Some other kind of drivers?
Just asking.
I’m impressed when the chair borne warriors weigh in. I usually wonder: have they ever experienced a similar situation? Have they trained to how to deal with it? Could they handle the event when it occurs?
I have experienced a serious flash flood event, not in Texas, but in the Mohave Desert, it presents itself with little warning and the force of the water is beyond expectations. Plucking soldiers out of wadis is high adventure. In my case, it turned out well, but these events are a cat’s whisker away from being a disaster.
I live on the northwest corner of Ft Hood, I can shoot a handgun onto their property from mine. I live on a mostly 4% grade 800 ft up on the side of a 1050 ft hill and I can get stuck in my pasture right now. All of the creeks and rivers are full in their banks or totally out. Every drop of rain that hits is instantly runoff.
I almost drowned in Cowhouse Creek on Ft Hood in 1972 when I was told to drive my M715 1 1/4 Ton truck through the high water.
No one who has ever seen these creeks around here after just an inch of rain would consider crossing.
This is a leadership failure that cost soldier's lives.
I am very familiar with that location.
That crossing is well marked with gauges and warnings and there is no vehicle that is certified to safely cross it at flood point.
If they have had as much rain as I've read about, I would hazard a guess that it was probably at not less than 6 feet, probably 8, and moving FAST!
I saw a V-100 get swept away at that crossing.
(A V-100 is a four-wheeled semi-amphibious lightly armored vehicle used during the VN war by the MP's.)
I would not attempt it in an M-1.
There are quite a few of those crossings on Fort Hood, all well-marked with HUGE warnings and cautions.
Prayers.