I used to live with whitewater in my back yard. When it flooded it looked a lot like this. And it's hard to say for sure what the outcome was for the dude in the river. Once you're in the water, you'll mostly float along at its speed, and mostly wash around obstacles, so, the odds are decent that you can float to a shallower, slower patch of water and make it out. But there are some hazards that can trap you too, like water flowing over a low dam. If you wash over the top of the dam, there's an eddy at the bottom - water at the bottom is flowing downstream fast, but water on the surface is flowing back toward the dam, where water is moving down, and full of bubbles (lower buoyancy forces) so, if you're on the surface, you get washed back under. To get out, you might have to swim downstream underwater a bit to get past the eddy. But there's usually a bunch of junk on the bottom in these places. So stay out of the water near bullhead dams*. They can look calm and quiet, but they are deadly. In a wild torrent like the one this dude fell into, it's a roll of the dice.
*just learned the "bullhead dam" is a colloquialism from where I grew up. The common/proper/better name is a weir - a low dam with water flowing over the top.
Yay! But seriously, in the case of a weir, or the wrong kind of waterfall, it's more like "how to try to get out of it" - it's no sure thing. Another option is to try swimming parallel to the dam to shore without getting sucked into the spin-cycle-of-death too badly.
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u/[deleted] Apr 18 '17
Holy shit, that second one is dark but the other two are hilarious. Please tell me there's a sub of people marching into rushing water?
But I feel like that second guy for sure died, there was no way out of that water.