deathmtn

Rain pounded down, soaking the streets with so much water that cars stalled and police shut down traffic. They felt their own car rattling, and they abandoned it in a nearby lot. Deciding they’d walk to safer ground where Mandli’s brother could pick them up, they waded hand-in-hand into murky water “until we reached the middle point of the road,” Mandli recalled, “where it just sucked us both inside.”

They were both suddenly underwater, being pulled toward a large black vacuum that seemed to be guzzling anything and everything into its wide, open mouth. Mandli managed to grab part of a bridge railing, but Reddy clutched only her hand. She shouted for help as she tried to wrest her fiance from the vortex. But it was just too wet, too slippery. Reddy disappeared. Mandli was left holding his empty jacket.

As South Plainfield police searched for Reddy, who had been sucked into a 3-foot-wide stormwater drainage pipe that ran underground, they looked where they thought it might spit him out, on the other side of the road.

…

To get a sense of how much force can be in play at the entrance of these pipes, consider that every cubic foot of water weighs 62.4 pounds. So if someone is standing in 4 feet of water, that’s nearly 250 pounds of force. “And that's not including any velocity that's heading toward the pipe,” said MacKenzie, the Denver flood district director. “And so if you have a full-grown man at maybe 200 pounds, he’s up against 250 pounds of water pressure pushing into the inlet of that pipe.