A normal taxi trip in the southern Chinese provenance of Hainan turned into a rescue worthy of a disaster movie Thursday after the car and its passengers were washed over a flooded dam during a torrential downpour, forcing firefighters to rescue the occupants clinging to a few posts in raging waters. You'll think twice about running into a river after watching this.
It's not clear whether the taxi driver realized water had overflowed the dam before he started to cross it, or wasn't aware that even a few inches of rapidly flowing water can push a vehicle off the road. Both the driver and passenger managed to cling to a couple of pier posts after the car was swept off -- waiting for rescuers to save them.
The officials weren't able to reach the woman riding as a passenger before the waters swept her downstream, but were able to pull her from the flood a few hundred meters away. The first stab at saving the taxi driver failed before firefighters had to bring in heavy machinery that could withstand the waters, but the taxi driver survived.