ST. LOUIS (AP) – Christina Thompson was joking when she texted her dad last month after days of unrelenting thunderstorms near his rural southern Missouri home: “Are you getting washed away?”
She didn’t realize that hours earlier, the 69-year-old retiree had been swept to his death as he tried to cross a flooded patch of road to get home. William Floyd’s body was found five days later, still in his 2009 Kia Spectra, which was wedged onto a log with only its bumper and rear tires visible.
“Why would he do that?” Thompson asked of her father’s ill-fated decision to drive through the water. “I was just wondering, ‘What was he thinking?’ My dad was smarter than that. It just didn’t make sense.”
Such tragedies are all too common. Despite public service announcements, warning signs, barriers and even gates at flood-prone crossings, the majority of flood deaths in America involve people trying to drive through water on flooded roads.
“It is frustrating,” said Todd Shea, warning coordinator meteorologist for the National Weather Service in La Crosse, Wisconsin. “It gets back to human nature. Sometimes you look at these cases and you just have to shake your head.”