Highway Bridge Diving

This summer it seems like it's been more rainy than usual, with several storms that have caused a lot of flooding on the roads and in the streams and ponds, which reminded me of something that happened several summers ago during a huge rainstorm.

The neighborhood we lived in was near the highway, and there was a bridge that ran over it at one point, where the street went through.  You could walk across the sidewalk on either side and look down onto the highway and see the traffic speeding by.  That part of the highway sloped downwards, and didn't start back uphill for quite a ways up the highway.

One late summer afternoon, we were treated to a downpour that lasted for quite awhile.  The gutters in the streets were overflowing, so much so that the manhole covers were raising up and crashing down with the water's movement.  The drainage ditches along the highway were full of debris, causing the water to back up onto the highway, and make what looked like a very large pond, right underneath the bridge.  Traffic was at a standstill, as the water had risen to well over six feet high, even higher in some places.

Somehow, some person got the idea that it would be fun to go swimming in the "pond" under the highway, since there was no traffic moving and the rain had slowed by then to a normal storm, and several people ended up sliding down the grass at the sides of the highway and into the water, swimming around in there like it was meant for just that purpose.  That was bizarre enough, but it got even weirder.

A complete idiot that was walking over the highway got the bright idea to use the railings as diving boards, and began to jump off the top of the railings and down into the water below!  What was worse was that once he'd jumped off, several other people decided to try it, and began climbing up on the railings and jumping, too!  A couple of my friends and I just stood and watched these morons, wondering how they kept from breaking their necks, but apparently the water was deep enough to prevent that.

Finally, the police arrived with their bullhorns and started warning the jumpers to knock it off first, then told the swimmers still below to get out of the water.  Before that, though, every time someone jumped, the idiots would clap and cheer every time someone dove off, as if it was some sort of competition.  Luckily, nobody started anything with the police and did as they were told, and everything ended peacefully.

After that, the drainage ditches were cleared on a regular basis, and since then the highway has been widened and a new bridge built over it, so there haven't been any more floods under the bridge.  My kids still don't believe me when I tell that story, though.  I guess it's just too hard to actually imagine something like that happening.

But it did.  Honest.