Comment by autoexec
3 days ago
> The "responsible adults" know that chasing perfection gets you nowhere fast.
I wouldn't call being prepared for very common life threatening events experienced by drivers "chasing perfection". The people with stalled cars are the lucky ones. Most of the drowning deaths in floods come from people who drove right into them.
I'll give them credit for over-correcting before deciding to pull out until they figure out how to handle floods even though it left people stranded on the road because of a small harmless puddle. Better to do that than take the risk and drive into a dangerous situation. Even still, this is something they should have fully tested before the cars ever hit a public street.
I wouldn't call floods "very common"
"Floods are the most common and widespread of all weather-related natural disasters...Flooding occurs in every U.S. state and territory, and is a threat experienced anywhere in the world that receives rain." (https://www.nssl.noaa.gov/education/svrwx101/floods/)
If they were going to plan for any kind of dangerous weather, flooding should have been very high up on that list.
People tend to take flash flood warnings way less seriously than tornado or severe thunderstorm warnings. I guess that people think of dangerous floods as being something much more obvious and dramatic than a street puddle just one foot deep, but flooding is no joke.
"Turn Around Don't Drown" PSA (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eI6mIlHKrVY)
They are still not very common. They happen more than other weather, but that still isn't common.
8 replies →
Any given person might only experience a single flooded roadway or two in their lifetime. But that doesn't mean that there aren't tens of thousands of people exposed to flooded roadways every year. Something can be individually uncommon and yet frequent in absolute terms.
It’s funny as someone from the North East who’s always lived around rivers I assumed uncommon means once or twice a year. Not disagreeing they are uncommon, nor suggesting driverless cars are never going to happen. Just marveling at how different two individuals understanding can be of the same word.
If you live in a city like Atlanta that gets significantly more rainfall that Seattle but concentrated into fewer rainy days, you’ll see flooded roadways multiple times per year.
Maybe not in California but anywhere like Atlanta that gets 50 inches of rain a year has quite a few flooded roadways.