Whenever I read stories of people drowning in floods, it seems there was only a foot of rain or less. I can see how this would be extremely destructive but how does water up to your neck and higher occur?
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The problem is that rain doesn’t just stay where it lands – it travels downhill.
So a moderate amount of rain up at higher altitudes will be collected and concentrated by the streams and rivers that flow past further downstream.
In fact it doesn’t even necessarily need to be raining downstream for a river to be overflowing and bursting its banks.
Most of the deaths you hear about do not occur in the large, relatively calm flooded areas (though there will often still be dangerous currents hidden there) that you see on TV, but at the points the water is concentrated and fast flowing – the person that got swept away trying to wade across a river, got trapped by rising floodwaters, fallen into the water as land has been washed away from under them, or caught in debris flowing past.
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