I have never witnessed a flash flood up close. It’s a natural phenomenon that I’m not super familiar with because I grew up in Florida and it’s so flat here. We get plenty of flooding. In fact, there’s been a ‘flood advisory’ on my iPhone’s weather app every time I’ve checked the weather for the past month and a half because we’ve been getting so much damn rain. But the ground is so flat there are no long tracts of land for a flash flood to form like the one you see above at the Tonto National Forest in Arizona.
The description of the video says it was filmed by volunteers ‘promoting responsible OHV in the Tonto National Forest’. I’m guessing that OHV stands for ‘Off Highway Vehicles’, or off-roading vehicles. So it seems a bit ironic that a group of people claiming to be promoting responsibility would get so close to such a devastatingly powerful flash flood. Maybe there’s a ‘safe zone’ with these flash floods and it’s just a few feet from the flood. Like I said before, I don’t know really know shit about flash flooding.
Watching this, I was reminded of these videos from earlier in the year. A semi-truck getting swept away like a leaf on a river during a flash flood, and this Australian bro riding a Jet Ski on the flood waters. (h/t DIGG Video)