The dangers of driving through flooded roads

With the heavy storms in Brisbane and Melbourne, it staggered me just how many drivers tried to drive through flooded roads. This is extremely dangerous to the point of being life threatening.

Even large four wheel drives have been caught out while the foolhardiness of some small car drivers beggars belief.

I can see more and more insurers making driving into flooded roads an exclusion under comprehensive motor vehicle policies. To me it is just courting danger and should not fall back to an insurer. If people had to wear the cost themselves it may just make people think twice.

The difficulty with the exclusion is that driving into a flooded road in broad daylight seeing the water and taking the risk is one thing. It is another if you are driving at night and simply do not see the road is flooded. Then I think insurance should be there to protect the driver/owner of the vehicle.

The other issue is when someone parks their car in an underground car park or on the side of a road and the area floods and therefore the car is inundated.

I can see lots of disputes over this issue and so I fear it will just become a blanket exclusion in view of the number of people taking the risk and the number of claims that are occurring from this cause.

I am not sure if it is a traffic offence but perhaps it should be as well as the wake caused by the vehicles often causes additional property damage to homes and businesses near by as well as the obvious risk to the driver and/or passengers and the vehicle itself.

The link here is to one street in Melbourne where Andrew Pitts, head of LMI Media lives. He grabbed a go pro camera and took this short video. https://www.facebook.com/andrew.d.pitts/videos/10211500258044607/