Get Out 1st or Your Car Becomes Coffin=How To Escape From A Car In Water

New York Times Magazine 4.16.2017 :

The New York Times

How to Escape From a Car in Water

April 14, 2017

By MALIA WOLLAN

“If you get on your phone and call your parents, or your sister, or 911, you will die,” says Robert May, a 21-year veteran of the Indiana State Police Underwater Search and Recovery Team. No one else will arrive in time; you have to save yourself.

Move quickly. Minivans might float for as long as 10 minutes, but the odds of survival are highest if you get out in the first 60 seconds. In a submersion study from the University of Manitoba, three passengers were able to exit with a child mannequin through a single driver-side window in just 53 seconds.

Unbuckle your seatbelt, lower your window and climb out, ideally onto the roof of the vehicle. If there are children present, attend to them first. Unfasten them from the back seat, pull them into the front and push them out your window, oldest ones first. In May’s experience, electric car windows will continue to work after impact with water (which he describes as soft, “like landing on a pillow”). Still, keep a small glass-breaking tool on your key ring or hanging from the rearview mirror, just in case.

Don’t open the door; water will flood in. Once full of water, the vehicle will sink fast. In one study, a 65-passenger bus sank in nine seconds. Vehicle submersions have one of the highest fatality rates of any type of single-motor-vehicle incidents, responsible for some 400 deaths a year in North America.

Dealing with the aftermath of drownings has made May an evangelist of sorts: He has written how-to guides, trained 911 dispatchers and even gone into the water in a car himself to test escape protocols. “Escape while the car is floating on the surface,” says May, who spent much of his career recovering vehicles, and sometimes their dead occupants, from the bottom of rivers, lakes, flooded roads, reservoirs and frozen retention ponds. Sometimes, he says, victims die in water shallow enough to stand in. Once, he reached into a car to recover four skeletons, and a burst of little catfish swam out. He hasn’t eaten one since.

After you get on top of your car, figure out if it makes sense to stay put or swim for dry ground. From there, call for help. Just get out first, May says, or “your car becomes your coffin.”