Teens die in car in icy pond

[asterroc]

I wish there were a little more factual information in this article. Five teens driving to school went off the road and into an icy pond. It took rescue crews 2 hours to get the car out, at which time the kids were found with their Bibles in their laps, still buckled into their seats, two already dead and the other three did not make it.

The part that's confusing me is if they had time to get their Bibles out, why did they not try to get out of the car?

Comments

[sammka.livejournal.com]

It is often not possible (or advisable) to escape from an underwater car, for several reasons:

1) power locks and windows will malfunction due to the water; they might be locked in

2) Water pressure will make it humanly impossible to open the doors if the car is substantially submerged (#1 and #2 are why some people (including me) keep tools in the car to break a window in case of an emergency).

3) If you are entirely underwater, then opening the door or breaking a window will cause all the water to pour into the car with incredible force, potentially trapping you in the car under the water.

4) If the water is icy, you have even less time to struggle out of the car once the door is open, since you may go into shock.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

I guess the lesson that I want to learn from this is when IS it advisable to open the window / open the door / break the window and try to escape? That is the opportunity that the news channel passed up in filming this article.

Obviously chosing to remain inside the car for two hours in its/their condition in an icy pond was a fatal choice. Would their chances have been better had they attempted to escape at some point during the process? Or were they doomed the moment the car hit the water?

Not to mention that we could've learned something about the reason the car went off the road in the first place. I read recently, I forget where, some statistic like teens who have other teens as passengers are four times more likely to have an accident than the average driver. They formed the conclusion that teens shouldn't drive other teens as they're easily distracted. I suspect that is the cause, but who knows if I'll ever find out.

[sammka.livejournal.com]

I think that it really depends on whether or not you're submerged and whether or not water is flooding in. It takes you longer to die of asphyxiation in a car with limited air in it, than it takes to die of drowning if you're underwater with no air at all. Then again, once you run out of air, it's the same either way (except, I guess, for the additional issue of hypothermia).

From this article and the fact that they used divers, the car was probably completely submerged underwater, in a lake that might have been quite deep. They might not have been able to open the doors at all, or had anything at hand (or the presence of mind) to break a window. We also don't know if the car stayed dry on the inside, or started flooding, so it's not clear what the effect of breaking a window would have been.

[sammka.livejournal.com]

...if your car were sinking, on the other hand, that's the time when I would guess breaking a window is the best option.