Low Water Crossings
Who is to Blame for Tragedies?
By Daniel Muniz

In my hometown of San Antonio Texas, 10-year old Christie Barajas tragically died when the car her grandmother was driving was swept away at a low water crossing during a flash flood.

However, Christie’s family is filing a lawsuit against the city of San Antonio. Their attorney, David Leibowitz who also serves as a representative in the Texas legislature, insists that it is the city’s fault because there were no barriers in place to prevent the grandmother from driving through the flooded road.

Although a city does have an obligation to protect its citizens from as many hazards as possible, about the only thing that it cannot do is protect people from their own recklessness.

Now I don’t want to sound flippant nor do I want to try to want to take away from the pain of this tragedy because it must be heart wrenching for any parent to experience the loss of one of their children. I have children of my own and I don’t ever want anything terrible to happen to them and I feel the same way for other parents.

But driving is dangerous which is why there are speed limits and why we must wear seatbelts. It is also important to use common sense. Generally speaking, we have to respect the inherent dangers of the highway as well as the conditions of the road. However, there is not very much that can be done to minimize human error because the human factor is always going to play a huge role in traffic accidents.

As a result, people must also have a healthy respect for nature and for physics. And they must be able to think for themselves especially in dangerous situations.

In any size city or town, it is impossible for a public works department to instantaneously put up barricades at every single low water crossing when a flash flood occurs. In fact, it is called a low water crossing because it doesn’t take much water to cover it. And a flash flood is called that because it can happen suddenly without any warning.

Although the Barajas family can be mad at the weather, they cannot file a lawsuit against Mother Nature so their target is the city of San Antonio.

But it is totally unrealistic for this family and for anyone else to reasonably expect that a city has the personnel and the resources to immediately set up barriers at every hazardous location in the event of bad weather. About every municipality has a finite budget in which all the concerns and priorities have to be addressed. Consequently, cities do not have the capability to have idle workers sitting around waiting for a storm to approach. It has other areas to spend its money on therefore no infrastructure will ever be perfect. It is just not feasible.

And whatever is feasible still has its limitations. For instance, the logistics of setting up barriers during a thunderstorm is still a daunting task. The reason “bad weather” is called that is because it is bad. City personnel cannot reach every single location at a moment’s notice because driving conditions are hazardous during bad weather conditions. The placement of barricades will happen when it can happen.

But suppose that during or after a storm, there is a flooded road but there is no barrier preventing passage through it. Should a person assume that a low water crossing is still safe enough to drive through it even though there is nothing warning them about any potential dangers?

In such a situation, the first question to ask is who has the greatest responsibility for your own personal safety?

Is it yourself or is it the government?

There are plenty of people who believe that everything in life is the government’s responsibility. That’s fine to ascribe to such a belief in the nanny state. But if you are going to allow the government to do all of your decision making and thinking for you, then you have to be willing to accept the consequences. And a lot of people have done precisely that in driving through low water crossings. In fact, fire departments often hear that excuse from the people that they have just rescued in which the victims claim that the flooded road had no barricade so they just drove right through it.

Fortunately we do not live in the nanny state as of yet. As a result, we still are required to do our own thinking.

Again, I do not intend to sound flippant but seriously, who does have your best interest in mind when it comes to your own personal safety. In all reality the person who has the most control over your own safety is yourself and that only happens when you are doing your own thinking.

Mother Nature, well, is a mother. When it rains, it floods. People have to respect that. And when a road is covered with water, don’t drive through it. In addition, we must respect physics because it will only act in accordance to the physical forces in play. If you cannot see a strong current in a flooded road, that doesn’t mean it is not there.

People can blame the government all they want but that does not alter the way our physical universe operates.

Of course the argument could be made that the road should never have been built in the first place. Perhaps that argument has some validity but for 99 percent of the time roads are usually safe. And even during that one percent of the time, a road is only dangerous if you make the conscious decision to drive your car through it while it is flooded.

In summary, Christie Barajas should not have died. That event was a very preventable. It is unfortunate that the accident happened but it is not the city’s fault. Instead, their state legislator attorney ought to be the one raising awareness of the issue instead of trying to find a way to scam a settlement from city hall.

People need to drive to conditions and they also need to respect nature and physics. And the more that people are aware of this, more lives will be saved.

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