I Didn’t Want to Risk It
Last month, a friend of mine began to cross a flooded river in his car with me in it. I jumped out because I’d been caught on a flooded causeway before. I now have a letter from his lawyer asking for damages because the car was washed off the causeway and written off.
I’m pretty sure this is a case of my (probably ex) friend being an idiot on a lawyer’s letterhead or not telling his lawyer the whole story. When I’m in the middle of it, it feels a lot different though. Early in November, we went to pick up car parts after work that my friend I’ll call Aaron (because his name’s Aaron and I think he’s being an idiot) had bought on eBay.
We had to go through some back roads to get to the property and picked it up and all was well. It’d been raining for part of the day but really picked up when we were loading the parts.
We got to a causeway we’d passed only an hour before, but it was now covered in what looked like half a meter of water and we stopped. I’d been navigating and knew we could back up and take another much longer route, even though the highway was just a bit on the other side of the causeway.
There was no way I’d go through the water as it looked, because I’d been caught on a causeway 20 years ago in less water and had my car pushed off into the river.
I didn’t want to risk it. I didn’t lose that car but it was one of the scariest moments of my life. I said we had to turn back and could take a different road and that it would take us via a bridge over the same river.
Aaron decided to push on and started moving and I panicked and got straight out. It was FAR more water than I’d had to go through when I nearly lost my car and life before.
Aaron didn’t even get halfway across before the water pushed his car off the side, rolled it completely over, and it ended upright on the bank downstream. He was EXTREMELY lucky not to drown, and I ran down and helped him out. Immediately he was aggressive and combative because he said with my weight in the car he’d have made it across.
The car is commodore wagon with a couple hundred kg of eBay parts in the back, so it’s not like I’d have made much difference. We phoned for help and the river went down within an hour and we made it across the causeway by foot.
We haven’t spoken since and he’s avoided me in places we usually go. But on Friday I received a letter from a lawyer I know is real in our town, but it sounds like it was written by my friend.
It’s asking for $50k for the car and personal damages because I made the car unsafe by getting out. It was a 1997 commodore, maybe worth $1,500 on a good day. I think he’s being a jerk. Story credit: Reddit / floodweight