Airbags float cars

RandomTroll
Mon, 04 Mar 2024 03:14:25 +0000
Safety

‘Early one morning not long ago, a municipal worker spreading road salt noticed damage to the dock at the end of Piermont Pier, a former railroad spur that juts a mile out into the Hudson River, south of the Governor Mario M. Cuomo Bridge. A bent cleat, splintered wood. On closer examination, there were tire tracks in the snow leading to the mess. Surveillance footage from a nearby scientific-research field station showed a car launching into the water in the middle of the night. It also showed the driver bailing before the plunge, without getting wet. And it showed the car floating north, with the incoming tide, like a duck boat. Then it went out of frame.

‘"The thing is, the air bags went off," Daniel Goswick, Sr., a chief with the Piermont Fire Department, said recently, explaining the peculiar buoyancy. "I think it was, like, a knot-and-a-half current. We basically figured out the trajectory of which way it was going and where it would sink." That was the easy part. After three hours of conducting a grid search on a fire-department boat, using side-scan sonar, they located the vehicle several football fields northeast of the pier and thirty feet down. Retrieving it, however, required diving, which is a Goswick family specialty. "I dove every part of this damn river," he said. "Me, my dad, my brother, my son, my cousins--basically, all of us were divers. And now my granddaughter and grandson are coming up."’

The New Yorker – 26 Feb 24

Thirty-Thousandths of a League Under the Hudson

Daniel Goswick, Sr., is the diver you call when you lose something in the river: a contact lens, a wedding ring, or a car that mysteriously drove off a pier recently.

In case you were wondering.

10 posts - 7 participants