Sometimes in an emergency, you have to think outside of the box to come up with a solution. When the Tulare Lake in California’s San Joaquin Valley flooded, these farmers dealt with the problem by using their pickup trucks as the primary structure for a levee. Twitter user Cannon Michael posted a video of the surprising scene (below).
According to the Twitter thread, Michael got this clip came from a friend of a friend. The farmers in the video needed to stop the flow of water into their orchard. They decided to pile dirt into the pickup beds and drive them into the hole in the levee. The video specifically shows a blue Chevrolet Silverado entering the gap. What appears to be a Ford F-150 is already in the water.
Next, the farmers used dirt to cover the rest of the hole. Judging from the speed of the water video, if they had decided to dump soil directly into the space, a lot of it would have washed away. The pickups created a solid structure that the added material was able to cling to.
Michael also posted images of the aftermath, and the farmers were able to rebuild the levee. The orchard is quite muddy but not completely flooded. When the water eventually recedes, they plan to dig out the pickups.
Whenever they rescue the trucks, we’d love to see a video of someone trying to restart them. After being buried completely under mud, the odds of the engine running again seem unlikely. However, stranger things have happened.
On Twitter, Michael notes that this is probably not the ideal way of solving this problem. However, water was flowing quickly onto the property, and these folks needed a solution soon.
According to the think tank the Public Policy Institute of California, melting snow in the Sierra Nevada mountains is flowing into the San Joaquin River and Tulare Lake basins. Various conditions this year mean that flooding in the area could affect a wider area than usual. It’s possible there could be “major disruptions to the farm economy in the region,” according to the report.
