Photograph: Dan Peled/The Guardian
When the rescue team arrived in Nundah, an inner suburb of Brisbane, on the night of Sunday 27 February 2022, the rain was heavy and power outages had left the city dark. A member of the public had reported seeing a car, with people inside, floating down the road. But when Brad Mitchell – a specialist swift-water rescue technician with Queensland Fire and Rescue Service – scanned the scene, all he could see was a vast black sea flowing where a city street once lay.
After 10 minutes of fruitless searching – wading through chest height water – the team was ready to go and look somewhere else, when a resident yelled from their balcony: “I can see a light!”
The team looked in the direction he was pointing and could see it too. “There was a light,” says Mitchell, “but it was actually under the water.”
For three days, a low-pressure system had been sucking up moisture from the Coral Sea and dumping it as rainfall over south-east Queensland. That day, over 228mm of rain had fallen in Brisbane – the highest daily total ever recorded in the city. Over the course of that week, Brisbane received nearly 80% of its annual average rainfall.
A year punctuated by extreme rainfall, often falling on to already sodden catchments, created a series of major flooding events that summer and spring, both in Queensland and New South Wales – events that contributed towards Australia recording its highest number of deaths by drowning in more than 25 years, and for rivers and creeks to become the leading location for drowning in 2021-22. Just last week, a young woman was found dead after the car she had been travelling in was swept away by flood waters in Gulgong, central-west NSW.
‘A lot more prevalent’
Data from the Royal Lifesaving National Drowning Report 2022 shows that of the flood-related deaths, more than 60% occurred in a vehicle. In Queensland, almost a third of all drowning deaths were due largely to people being trapped in their cars in flood water – taking over from “swimming and recreating” as the leading activity prior to drowning.
When Mitchell arrived at work that Sunday morning, he knew the extreme rain meant rescues from cars could be on the cards. Since he first started in the job around 10 years ago, pulling people out of vehicles in floods has become “a lot more prevalent”.
The first of the day was in Burpengary, a town north of Brisbane. A car carrying three people had stalled while trying to cross a road covered by flowing water. By the time Mitchell and his team got there, the occupants had escaped the vehicle – which had disappeared downstream – but were hanging above the water from a tree.
“It was quite treacherous,” says Mitchell. “The woman was panicked because she was losing her strength, so it was time-critical for us to get to her. The other gentleman – I think because he was in a bit of panic and he didn’t know how strong the water was – he was under the belief that he could swim to the side of the waterway.”
As the team inflated a raft and secured it to the bank with ropes, Mitchell could see big slabs of bitumen lifting up from the road and floating away. Using what’s known as a vector pull – where one rope is pulled horizontally, the other vertically – and with a rescuer in the raft, all three people were safely retrieved. “They were lucky,” says Mitchell. With all the debris in the water, if they’d gone in it would have been a “very serious situation for them”. If they hadn’t escaped their car, “we wouldn’t have got to them until the water receded”.
The occupants of the car in Nundah later that night, however, hadn’t got out. When the rescue team swam over to the submerged vehicle, Mitchell could see it had nearly filled with water and that one of the two people inside was unconscious. They smashed the back window, dragging out the unconscious woman first, and then a man.
Both people survived. A week later, they came to the fire station to thank their rescuers, describing how the water they drove through didn’t seem that deep, and they were surprised at how quickly their car floated away. Trapped inside, they had texted their final farewells to family, before they saw the rescuers’ torch.
“They were very thankful,” says Mitchell, who met the couple. “When we got there, I think they only had about 30 seconds left before that car was full of water and they wouldn’t have had any air to breathe at all.”
‘A very difficult thing to warn about’
Despite persistent warnings from authorities, people continue to drive through flood water. During flooding in regional Victoria two weeks ago, 200 motorists were rescued in just 24 hours.
Why people do this, despite the well-publicised danger, is complex. Studies of flood-related vehicle fatalities show risk factors include being male, driving a 4WD, having high levels of confidence and experience as a driver, and drivers who are under the instruction of others. One analysis showed 60% of victims died within 20km of their home – suggesting a familiarity with the road.
Mel Taylor, an associate professor at Macquarie University, says her research shows little evidence that people drive through water with frivolous intent. They may be evacuating, collecting animals or going to work. But while these reasons are “perfectly valid for the individual, because they’re in the context at that time”, humans are not always good at weighing up known versus unknown risk. We may put more weight on the certain risk we will be late for work if we don’t keep driving, and less on the possibility of a type of accident we have never experienced.
Taylor’s research also indicates that people are encouraged to drive through flood water by seeing others successfully do the same – what’s known as a “normalcy bias”. “Once somebody’s embarked on a course of action, they look for things that confirm their hypothesis about what they’re doing,” says Taylor. “So if the person in front of you has gone through, you’ll likely see that as ‘They’ve done it, so can I’.”
The reality is, many people – more than 50% in one of Taylor’s surveys – have driven through flood water. The vast majority – more than 90% – did so without any negative consequence. “People do die, but it’s a small number of people compared to the people who are doing it,” says Taylor. “And that makes it a very difficult thing to warn about in terms of risk perception, because if you get away with it [once], why would it be any different next time?
“I think that’s where it gets super tricky for emergency services. Because they’re responsible for public safety, and the only safe thing to do is just not do it. And that’s unequivocal, and that’s why the messaging is ‘don’t do it’. I think the challenge is to find a way to communicate when it is safe, or safer, to do it. There’s such a reluctance to acknowledge the fact that this is what people do. And we know from psychology, the phrase is, ‘put the path where the people walk’. So, work with what people do, rather than what you want them to do.”
The urgency to find better solutions is increasing. The 2022 drowning report warns that “climate change will continue to impact drowning in Australia … increased extreme heat events and more intense heavy rainfall events are likely to result in increased drowning risk”.
Taylor says better infrastructure, such as barriers and “live” signage along waterways, could help, as well as finding “other levers” to prompt people to reconsider – such as highlighting the impact on rescuers or passengers, especially children.
It doesn’t take much for a car to stall
As someone who regularly sees what happens when things go wrong, Mitchell sees the risk clearly.
“It doesn’t take much water to make a vehicle stall, particularly a smaller vehicle, a lower vehicle,” he says.
“And flood water can be deceptive. People can misconstrue what they’re seeing. The water on top can look like it’s moving nicely, but underneath it can be moving twice as fast. And you don’t know what’s underneath. The power of water is that phenomenal, all it needs is a little gap and it’ll corrode away the dirt and even under the bitumen as well. There may be big holes underneath that road you don’t know are there, but if you drive on them they’ll just give in.”
With a third La Niña weather cycle well under way, Mitchell says the prospect of pulling more people from vehicles is something his team has been made well aware of.
“I think it’s on everyone’s mind.”
