The Lemon Fool

Captivating viewing, watching people voluntarily driving their ordinary cars into an almost 3ft deep ford.

This place is turning into a tourist attraction with a small audience gathering to watch proceedings whenever the water gets deep after some heavy rainfall.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1HHFXF ... Sunderland

Must have been millions of quids-worth of wrecked engines by now...

Snorvey wrote:Why is it even there (other than for entertainment)?

Surely they can fix it with a small bridge?

It's all a bit weird, given there is another route over the river nearby. I guess its a public right of way and closing it would not be popular locally as a lot of the time its perfectly passable. The clue is in the big yellow depth gauge sign to one side of it!

Edit to add, even 'small bridges' good enough for lorries probably cost in the £ms of quid.

Just imagine. All over the country, there must be people watching this video and realising with a sickening lurch why that car they bought last week has that peculiar smell emanating from the carpets.

BJ

More seriously, wouldn't a sensible council have closed that part of the road?

It's a useful road. Closing it would add to journey times and pollution, and most of the time the depth is fine for ordinary cars, e.g. VW Polos.

I'm not a fan of the nanny state closing off useful options just because there are a few idiots that can't use them safely. It's not like there isn't advice out there on how to ford a stream or river, and there is a depth guage at Rufford, and there should be common sense. If you can't see the road surface because the water is too turbulent, it's probably too deep to ford in a normal car.

Mike4 wrote:Captivating viewing, watching people voluntarily driving their ordinary cars into an almost 3ft deep ford.

Interesting to watch but also quite cringe-worthy the naivety, and esp those in hatchbacks or regular saloons! It reminds me of spending a year on the NE coast of the US and driving the daily 50 mile commute for work. Now when those winter Nor-easters come in they can dump mega snowfall and fast. This one in 2000 merited it's own Wiki entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/December_ ... r%27easter I recall 20" in a single day in our town, and that's before snow-drift into banks a metre+ high.

Well about the same time a popular new car was the Subaru Forester 4WD. There were ads on TV every night repeated many times. It was marketed as being able to 'go anywhere', backed by videos of it driving up mountain-sides and so on. The striking thing on the quite treacherous blizzarding drive home that day (and it was homewards, as no way you'd set out for work in such conditions, but you would be naturally incentived to try and wing it just to get home), was that of the many many abandoned cars by the side of the highway, several 'totalled', how many were Foresters. I remember driving home, oh-so-damned-carefully, praying I'd make it at 20mph max in my ancient but wonderful 1974 Malibu thinking 'Oh look another Forester.... ... and there's another... ... another, these drivers took the ads a bit too seriously eh?....'.

I expect Subaru don't run ads in the US like that any more. --- Thanks for the link Mike, human nature can be a source of much wonderment eh?

DiamondEcho wrote:

Mike4 wrote:Captivating viewing, watching people voluntarily driving their ordinary cars into an almost 3ft deep ford.

Interesting to watch but also quite cringe-worthy the naivety, and esp those in hatchbacks or regular saloons! It reminds me of spending a year on the NE coast of the US and driving the daily 50 mile commute for work. Now when those winter Nor-easters come in they can dump mega snowfall and fast. This one in 2000 merited it's own Wiki entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/December_ ... r%27easter I recall 20" in a single day in our town, and that's before snow-drift into banks a metre+ high.

Well about the same time a popular new car was the Subaru Forester 4WD. There were ads on TV every night repeated many times. It was marketed as being able to 'go anywhere', backed by videos of it driving up mountain-sides and so on. The striking thing on the quite treacherous blizzarding drive home that day (and it was homewards, as no way you'd set out for work in such conditions, but you would be naturally incentived to try and wing it just to get home), was that of the many many abandoned cars by the side of the highway, several 'totalled', how many were Foresters. I remember driving home, oh-so-damned-carefully, praying I'd make it at 20mph max in my ancient but wonderful 1974 Malibu thinking 'Oh look another Forester.... ... and there's another... ... another, these drivers took the ads a bit too seriously eh?....'.

I expect Subaru don't run ads in the US like that any more. --- Thanks for the link Mike, human nature can be a source of much wonderment eh?

My wife had a Subaru Outback for a while, which was the slightly bigger/smaller sibling to the Forester. They both had 4WD but neither would have done well in this situation - they quite simply were not far enough off the ground, and therefore vulnerable to such risks.

My wife at least acknowledged the fact that Subarus were popular with lesbians. She called it her Lesburu.

Lootman wrote: My wife had a Subaru Outback for a while, which was the slightly bigger/smaller sibling to the Forester. They both had 4WD but neither would have done well in this situation - they quite simply were not far enough off the ground, and therefore vulnerable to such risks.

My wife at least acknowledged the fact that Subarus were popular with lesbians. She called it her Lesburu.

Yep, one for the hairiest, hottest and and fastest modified Subaru Impreza Turbos I"ve ever seen was owned by customers of mine, a wife/wife couple in Reading. They used it mainly as a regular shopping car for pootling about in Reading.

No expert here, but I find I agree with various comments under the YouTube video, that some of those 4x4s might have been able to make it, if only the drivers had crawled through the water rather than charging at speed through it and flooding their engines.

Our Council puts out Flood signs for an inch of water on the road... one would think there'd be a Potentially Deep Water sign here.
Perhaps there was and the chaps who do the towing took it down...

V8

88V8 wrote:Our Council puts out Flood signs for an inch of water on the road... one would think there'd be a Potentially Deep Water sign here.
Perhaps there was and the chaps who do the towing took it down...

V8

I can quite understand a council putting warning signs out in those circumstances.

An inch of water on an ordinary road can be very dangerous, eg if a car hits it at speed and aquaplanes. The risk is very different to a ford, where signage is present and (all sensible) motorists know to slow down to walking pace or slower, take it easy through the water tnen test their brakes afterwards.

Rufford ford is well signed, and has hinged "road closed" signs, presumably put in place when the water is a certain depth. These are often visible on the videos, and are routinely ignored. I did see one video where police were pulling up drivers who had crossed when road closed signs were active.

88V8 wrote:Our Council puts out Flood signs for an inch of water on the road... one would think there'd be a Potentially Deep Water sign here.
Perhaps there was and the chaps who do the towing took it down...

V8

It is so well known and signed that people must know it is there.

Failing that the 20 or so grinning loons with their camera phones out at the side of the road might be a clue.

It's down here, thttps://goo.gl/maps/c2AnznzKeYpehBVm8 here are 4 signs warning of the Ford, and a depth indicator. The 2 at the actual ford seem to have gone in over the last 12 months, ut you can use the date slider in GSV to see that in Jan 2021 the road was marked as 'closed' but I suspect people ignored it.

Paul

Do the locals really want this to stop though?
Anyone with a high-clearance vehicle and a tow-bar - a tractor for instance - can make £££ from grateful towees.
£5 or £10 a pop (errrm..tax-free) ?

DrFfybes wrote:

88V8 wrote:Our Council puts out Flood signs for an inch of water on the road... one would think there'd be a Potentially Deep Water sign here.
Perhaps there was and the chaps who do the towing took it down...

V8

It is so well known and signed that people must know it is there.

Failing that the 20 or so grinning loons with their camera phones out at the side of the road might be a clue.

It's down here, thttps://goo.gl/maps/c2AnznzKeYpehBVm8 here are 4 signs warning of the Ford, and a depth indicator. The 2 at the actual ford seem to have gone in over the last 12 months, ut you can use the date slider in GSV to see that in Jan 2021 the road was marked as 'closed' but I suspect people ignored it.

Paul

Link doesn't work for me. I just get a blank white page.

Mike4 wrote:

DrFfybes wrote:It is so well known and signed that people must know it is there.

Failing that the 20 or so grinning loons with their camera phones out at the side of the road might be a clue.

It's down here, thttps://goo.gl/maps/c2AnznzKeYpehBVm8 here are 4 signs warning of the Ford, and a depth indicator. The 2 at the actual ford seem to have gone in over the last 12 months, ut you can use the date slider in GSV to see that in Jan 2021 the road was marked as 'closed' but I suspect people ignored it.

Link doesn't work for me. I just get a blank white page.

Take the extraneous 't' off the beginning of the link.

Scott.

swill453 wrote:

Mike4 wrote: Link doesn't work for me. I just get a blank white page.

Take the extraneous 't' off the beginning of the link.

Scott.

Ah good spot!!

This works
https://www.google.com/maps/@53.1831898 ... 384!8i8192

Mike4 wrote:This works
https://www.google.com/maps/@53.1831898 ... 384!8i8192

Why does the Google vehicle seem to always be driving on the wrong side of the road?

Mapping from behind! Obvious, really.

...Strictly speaking, time is going backwards.

It is a peculiar psychological effect (at least it was for me), because, unusually, you could see a shadow of the vehicle and camera on the roadway you (I) subconsciously anchored one's frame of reference - for both space and time - to the vehicle and assumed you were experiencing real changes in space and proper time, when in effect I was 'travelling' backwards in time; i.e. effectively car on correct side of road, but moving in reverse.