Learning to Survive

Of the ten Georgia deaths during the September flood,
most could have been prevented.

People who thought water on the road not too deep
to drive through were swept into a creek or river
where the automobile was quickly submerged. Drivers
did not know to lower the windows before the vehicle
sank and while the engine was still running. Nor did
some know a door can be opened after the auto fills
with water so that the pressure on either side is equal.

And they failed to understand the nature of floods or
they wouldn't have entered the water in the first place.

Surviving drivers usually exclaim something about how
the water didn't look that deep, "It wasn't up to the
guard rail", or, "Just a couple feet, I thought I could
make it." This is not standing water. There are strong
undercurrents.A couple of feet of water moving
across a paved parking lot turned an empty school bus
on its side.

Two boys tried to swim to an partly-submerged car
thinking its occupants in danger. One boy was
rescued by a firefighter, the other was swept away,
his body recovered much later. He was 14. There
was no one in the car.

During the 1990 flood, five years before that boy was
born, a man aged 42 drowned under the same
circumstances: he tried to swim to an automobile that
had been abandoned in the same flooded field near
Trion.

Most of the Georgia deaths occurred in the Atlanta area.
There were reports of a hundred-year flood in parts of the
area, and of a five-hundred-year flood in other parts. There
was also speculation that this flood was so much worse than
previous floods because of the proliferation of new housing
developments and other construction, not only near Atlanta
but throughout the neighboring counties. Where once were
fields of permeable ground there now are seas of roofs and
mile after mile of pavement.

The changing landscape has affected people's lives in many
ways. Perhaps one effect has been to distance us from the
natural world. There is a wealth of information about self
defense against muggers and swindlers and other varieties
of criminals, and perhaps not enough about surviving the
raging elements. Maybe we should be made more aware
of that aspect of nature which is "red in tooth and claw".