Accident or inevitable?

Victor

http://home.eircom.net/content/unison/national/4040497?view=Eircomnet

River tragedy mother 'felt secure in huge pick-up jeep'
From:The Irish Independent
Sunday, 19th September, 2004
RALPH RIEGEL in Bantry

THE mother who died with her toddler daughter in a flash flood last week probably felt confident enough to cross a swollen ford because she was driving a large pick-up truck.

Locals yesterday said they suspected that Orla O'Driscoll would have felt secure enough to tackle the crossing because she was in such a large vehicle, a Mitsubishi L200.

It has emerged that the O'Driscoll family were in the process of building a new footbridge across the river which claimed the lives of Orla, 33, and her three-year-old daughter, Muire.

The tragedy occurred as Orla was taking her six-year-old son, Fionnan, to a local birthday party with Muire also in the family jeep/pick-up.

The Mitsubishi L200 is a large utility vehicle used mainly by small businesses involved in the construction industry. It had a huge surge in popularity a few year ago when there were tax concessions to buy them. These concessions have now been withdrawn.

It has a five-seater cab in front of a pick-up area and is more of a commercial vehicle than a SUV. Sports Utility Vehicles have been the subject of some controversy recently.

Yesterday one local told the Sunday Independent: "I know that Orla would have felt very secure driving across the water in that big vehicle. It was a huge thing. Sitting behind the steering wheel, she probably thought she would have no problem crossing."

But she was caught in a flash flood on the normally sedate Borlin stream which feeds into the Coomhola River near Bantry last Thursday.

The double tragedy came just four months after Orla and her husband Finbarr had moved into the idyllic mountain farmhouse at Milleens, on Coomhola mountain in the foothills of the Caha range. Finbarr is an electrical engineer at Conoco on Whiddy Island.

The couple, who had planned to start free-range and organic farming on the picturesque 80-acre property, purchased the farmhouse last February but only moved onto the site in May. They had been temporarily living in a caravan on site while the two-storey farmhouse was being refurbished.

The couple were not from the area and had no idea of the ferocity of the flash floods that, due to mountain rainfall, can turn 18-inch streams into 20-foot deep torrents in a matter of minutes.

Orla managed to save Fionnan by hoisting him to safety on a riverbank but she was unable to lift Muire sufficiently far from the vehicle's cab so that Fionnan could hold onto his sister.

The mother-of-two shouted for her son to run to the nearby Bantry-Kilgarvan roadway for help but as the child reached the corner just 100 metres from the ford, he turned to see that his mother, sister and the Mitsubishi had been washed away.

The little boy ran almost a mile to raise the alarm. When motorist Vicky Flynn stopped, he simply explained: "Please help, Mammy and Muire have been washed away. They've been washed out to sea."

The tragedy occurred when the O'Driscolls' large Mitsubishi became stranded just before 3pm last Thursday on a ford leading to their farmhouse as the Borlin tributary of the Coomhola River raged into full flood.

Access to the O'Driscoll farmhouse is via the ancient ford which, a number of years ago, was underpinned with poured concrete.

The water normally flows over the ford at a depth of around eight to 12 inches, but last Thursday the tiny stream turned into a raging flood which forced the vehicle off the concrete-lined riverbed and down into a chasm strewn with boulders and tree trunks.

Water depths in that chasm are believed to have exceeded 22 feet at one point last week.

The Sunday Independent has learned from neighbours that, at one point, a wooden footbridge existed over the Coomhola tributary close to the spot.

"There was a footbridge there but it disappeared a number of years ago. The water is very powerful here. You'd have to see the stream in flood to believe its power," one neighbour explained.

After decaying for decades, the footbridge was allowed to disappear. However, had the footbridge remained, or had there been a strong barrier downstream of the ford, the tragedy might have been averted.

Without such a barrier, the jeep, which is more like small truck, was torn by the force of the water over 120 metres downstream. Locals said that once the jeep was swept down into the chasm, there was little hope for Orla or Muire.

Others, however, warned that the force of water was so great that nothing less than a reinforced steel beam across the river could have held the jeep in place.

The ESB has confirmed that it was in no way involved with the huge quantity of water that came cascading down the mountain river.

One neighbour, Eileen Murphy, said she now stands on a hillside looking down into the ravine and can only weep.

"It's just too terrible to think about - she was such a lovely, kind person. We're all devastated that this could happen here," she added.

The battered vehicle was eventually found wedged deep in a heather and gorse-lined ravine, between boulders on the riverbed.

Yesterday, the only reminder of the appalling tragedy at the site was a simple bouquet of wild flowers left on the riverbank. Muire was found 400 metres downstream from the jeep while Orla's body was found, caught on river debris, almost one kilometre from the Mitsubishi. A post-mortem examination confirmed both had drowned.

Both mother and daughter will be removed tomorrow evening from Coakley's Funeral Home to St Finbarr's Church in the West Cork town. The two will be buried after Requiem Mass at 11am on Tuesday.

ChipZilla

You shouldn't believe everything (or assume you can do everything...) you see 4x4s do in ads on telly...

sliabh

A cousin spent a few years working as a truck driver in the US in the early 90's. He said in the winter you used to see loads of 4WDs in ditches, wrapped around lamp posts or embedded in other cars. More so than other vehicles. The reason being when the weather turned bad (wet, snow or icy) the drivers would turn on the 4wd and assume that they then were all right and the conditions would not affect them.

But then then that is part of the reason why SUVs have a greater accident rate that more conventional vehicles.

BrianD3

sliabh wrote:

A cousin spent a few years working as a truck driver in the US in the early 90's. He said in the winter you used to see loads of 4WDs in ditches, wrapped around lamp posts or embedded in other cars. More so than other vehicles. The reason being when the weather turned bad (wet, snow or icy) the drivers would turn on the 4wd and assume that they then were all right and the conditions would not affect them.

But then then that is part of the reason why SUVs have a greater accident rate that more conventional vehicles.

I agree completely. I have seen lots of 4WDs get stuck in difficult conditions because the driver overestimated the vehicle's and/or his own capabilities. It's a sort of "invincibility complex" that drivers of 4WDs often have. Worryingly this also applies to safety - drivers think that because they're in a large jeep, they're safe as houses. They're not, and neither are the people they hit :mad:

BrianD3