All language subtitles for Raging.Planet.S01E01.1080p.DSCP.WEB-DL.AAC2.0.H.264-WiLF

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NARRATOR: Flash floods strike
and take their victims...

...by complete surprise.

Powerful walls of water
destroy everything in their path.

Of all extreme weather conditions,

floods cause
the greatest number of deaths.

(Cries out)

At any one moment,

12,000 billion tonnes of water
are suspended in the atmosphere,

waiting to fall as rain.

Below, more than
37 million billion cubic metres

make their way across the planet,

relentlessly flowing downwards.

Most of the time, we can harness
and manage its power.

But when the world's water
runs out of control,

it becomes a flood.

And nothing can stop it.

The most dangerous floods
are unexpected flash floods.

They often happen
in the world's driest places.

When thunderstorms hit the deserts
of the south-western United States,

the rainwater they bring
can kill without warning.

Las Vegas is
the second-driest city in America.

It's surrounded by desert.

Sherry Swensk has been a weather
forecaster here for 15 years.

Our climate is known for just being
hot and dry and unforgiving.

Overwhelmed by floods?

That's nuts!

But on 9th August 2003,

huge thunder clouds
gathered over Vegas

and unleashed a year's worth of rain
in less than an hour.

That day, that much rain
on our hard desert dirt,

it hit and it ran.

Flood-control basins designed to
protect the city were overwhelmed.

The detention basins
were doing their job.

They were keeping up
as fast as they could.

Unfortunately,
it wasn't fast enough.

That day, Angela Stitcher set off

to pick up her two young children
from nursery school.

As she drove under a highway bridge,

she had no idea the flood
was heading straight towards her.

There wasn't really any standing
water when I got there,

nothing to cause any concern.

But the water just came out of
nowhere. It was like a tidal wave.

I was just a sitting duck.
There was nowhere I could go.

The water was more than a metre deep
and moving at 40km/h.

The water was actually coming up
to my window.

There was a man standing on top
of a U-Haul truck,

yelling at me to get out of my car.

MAN: Get out of the car now!

The sheer force of the flood
starting moving her car.

So I climbed up on top of my car.

I think, at this point,
fear really started to set in.

And then, as I lay there, I just
realised, 'OK, this is it.

This is my time.'

I've accepted it.
I've said my goodbyes.

I pictured the faces of my kids

and I just laid there
and I closed my eyes, thinking,

'OK, I'm ready to go.'

The next thing I know,
there was a guy shaking me.

And I was like,
'Wow! Where did he come from?!'

A police rescue helicopter braved
the nearby powerlines to rescue her.

It was like,
'Oh, hi. I'm glad you're here.'

They reached Angela just in time.

Before they even got me
up in the helicopter,

my car washed away.

So they made it
not a moment too soon.

The man on the truck decided
his only option was to jump.

Luckily, he wasn't hurt.

He also escaped the flood.

More than 60 people had to be rescued
from the water that day.

Even the fire department had to be
airlifted to safety.

The power of moving water
is tremendous,

because it moves quickly
and it gathers speed.

That six inches of water that's
moving down a road or a street

can gain 30 miles an hour in speed.

It's very powerful,
and can become really dangerous.

Just 15cm of water is enough
to sweep you off your feet.

That depth can exert
a third of a tonne of pressure.

That's enough to push a car around.

A flow of about half a metre
can move heavy vehicles,

like this fully loaded cement mixer.

And the steeper the slope,
the more powerful the flow.

*

Northern California has one of the
highest rainfall totals in the US.

An extensive system
of dams and levees

channels snowmelt and rainwater
down from the Sierra Nevada mountains

to the orchards and vineyards
of the Sacramento Valley.

These giant levees were built
in the early 1900s

to protect this valuable land
and the people who live here.

Almost a hundred years later,
during the winter of 1996,

they were tested to the limit.

Unusually warm weather
was melting snow in the mountains.

Heavy storms
dropped over a metre of rain.

As the reservoirs reached capacity,

water manager Steve Onken
started to worry.

By December 30th, most of the
reservoirs in Northern California

were full,

and we were releasing
or spilling water

because the inflow
was greater than we could store.

There was just too much rain,
too much run-off,

and we were headed
for a flood-type situation.

As the pressure built up
behind the dams,

the hydro-engineers released
more and more water.

They assumed the levees downstream
would keep it contained.

But they were wrong.

It was New Year's Eve
in Marysville, California,

and Mike and Mary-Anna Otorino
were on holiday

during one of the wettest winters
on record.

Water managers were trying to keep
the nearby dam from overflowing.

As the river level rose,
the Otorinos were unconcerned.

We honestly didn't think there was
gonna be a problem for us, no,

because we just felt the levee
is going to hold

and it's doing what it's designed
to do.

We could count on the levee.

But when rising levels
put too much pressure on the levees,

one of them collapsed.

As the water swept out across
the California flood plain,

the authorities were powerless
to stop it.

The water spreads out very quickly.

If you're in the path of the water,
you're in trouble.

The Otorinos were staying

at a friend's house
close to the levee break.

Police warned them
they had 15 minutes to get out.

They left just before dark.

So we started down the road
and the road looked fine

until we got to the corner.

As soon as we made the turn,

the headlights from the car
shone upon the water

and there was literally
a river of water

going across the roadway.

The Otorinos decided
they could cross safely.

That was a big mistake.

It just got higher and higher
and higher,

and at that point,
the car stalled.

As the water kept going up and up,

we realised, 'This is definitely
serious. This is not good.'

(ENGINE STALLS)

We then had to evacuate
and get on the roof of the car.

And then it started to lap
at our feet on the roof.

And this all happened within
20 minutes, so it rose very rapidly.

Because of the force of the water,

we were now holding on
to each other.

They hung on till daybreak,

when a rescue helicopter spotted them

standing on top
of their submerged car.

After spending nearly 13 hours
in the water,

seeing that helicopter come back
and stop over us,

you couldn't believe
the feeling that we felt.

The downdraft
from the helicopter blades

pushed them into the flood water.

I started sinking and sinking,

and all of a sudden,
I felt an arm grabbing my arm,

and turned me around, and all of a
sudden there was a halter around me.

It was the fastest ride
I have ever been,

I was just so excited and delighted,
it was amazing.

The Otorinos were lucky
to survive their ordeal.

In the US, 60% of all flood
fatalities die in their cars.

Weather and storms and water,

these are things
that have an impact on people

and can take away things
in a matter of seconds.

The faster water flows,
the more dangerous it becomes.

Even the slightest increase in speed
can turn a creek into a deathtrap.

(SCREAMS)

This woman in Turkey became trapped

when she tried to drive
across a flooded river.

(PEOPLE TALK ALL AT ONCE)
(WOMAN SCREAMS)

(PEOPLE SCREAM)

Somehow, the driver escaped
with her life.

Floods can be incredibly destructive.

When flood waters
swept right through the middle

of a small English village,

the devastation was terrible.

The coast of Cornwall ranks among
the most beautiful in the world.

Here, rugged cliffs meet the waters
of the Atlantic,

and give century-old villages shelter
from ocean storms.

One is the village of Boscastle,
home to just 800 people.

Every summer,

holiday-makers are drawn
to Boscastle's medieval harbour,

which sits at the bottom
of a huge natural funnel.

Trixie Webster serves the tourists
at the Harbour Light's teashop.

The building had been in my family
for 50 years.

It was a 14th-century building

which was one of the most
photographed buildings

in the whole of Cornwall.

Graham King is curator of the Museum
of Witchcraft in Boscastle.

It's totally magical.

It's something about the wildness
of the sea,

the very steep valley,

it's a combination of all these
things somehow blend together.

Part of Boscastle's picturesque charm

comes from its gently
meandering rivers.

But this also means
that any rain which falls here

is channelled straight
through the village.

In August 2004, these gentle streams
became torrents.

*

August 2004 - the height of the
holiday season in Boscastle, England.

Trixie Webster was serving tea
to a full house.

Down to this level.

It was just at midday,

this big black cloud came over.

There was now an 11km-wide storm
at the top of the valley

above the village.

The river started rising
at quite a horrendous rate,

and it went right up to the top
of the riverbanks,

which is very unusual.

The waters started flowing down
the main street.

Boscastle was now at the mercy
of a flood.

It just changed into something
that's terrifying.

You can't imagine that's the same
river and the same place,

but of course it is.

MAN: It's gonna break the bridge.

People struggled
to get through the water,

even though it was just
a few centimetres deep.

Then, things went from bad to worse.

From a car park
at the top of the village,

some of the cars began
to drift downhill.

When the first car came down,

we didn't even know if there was
someone in it or not,

and we couldn't do anything
about it.

It was a horrible, horrible feeling.

If anybody had fallen in
at that point,

there would have been no coming back

because to wash cars away
as it did,

cars and vans just bobbing along
like dinky toys,

that's quite powerful.

The flood literally threw the cars
at the buildings.

Trixie Webster's 600-year-old
teashop began to crumble.

Water just burst through the door

and burst through the windows
at the back.

Every car that came down hit it.

And it just disappeared.

It was there one minute
and it was gone the next.

The building didn't stand a chance.
It just disintegrated.

Over 1.5 billion litres of rainwater
flowed through Boscastle that day.

With almost a thousand lives
at stake,

rescuers launched the biggest airlift
since World War II.

After two hours,
the flood began to subside,

exposing the devastation
it had left behind.

Just the destruction, the mess,
it was quite amazing.

It's quite incredible how much
the river had changed the landscape.

It was like a bombsite.
Everything was...

It was terrible - cars piled
one on top of the other,

the building across from me
had trees in every window.

It was very difficult
to take on board, really.

With 84 vehicles lying wrecked
at the harbour entrance,

the search for victims got underway.

Dozens of cars had been swept
through the village.

Rushing water can even be powerful
enough to move ten-tonne boulders.

But incredibly, the flood
hadn't claimed a single life.

The Caribbean coast of Venezuela.

When the Spanish conquistadors
arrived here in the early 1500s,

they dared to build towns
where the local Indians did not -

crammed onto a tiny flood plain
between steep mountains and the sea.

Professor of engineering
Carlos Anatias

now understands the risk
his ancestors took.

Not knowing this menace, we decided
to build in the middle of the way

that the water normally takes
to come down to the sea.

And every once in a while,

the water comes
and produces a lot of disasters.

When extreme rain fell in 1999,

30,000 people paid with their lives.

(DISTANT HUBBUB)

The coastal resort of Los Corales
in Venezuela

was home to Justino Bravo.

(MAN SPEAKS SPANISH)

In December 1999, an unusually
fierce storm hit the coast.

As it approached the city,
Justino began filming.

(JUSTINO SPEAKS SPANISH)

At the nearby airport,

Mandy Donahue arrived
for a holiday with some friends.

The rain was really coming down.

I, not having travelled,
just sort of thought,

'This is what it's supposed
to look like. It rains here.'

But this wasn't normal.

Over the next few days,
there was two years' worth of rain.

The steady sort of drumbeat
of the rain was like...

It just droned on and on.
You just sort of stop hearing it

because it's so constant.

In all, there was a metre of rain.

It ran down from the mountains
behind the town,

gathering volume and power
all the way.

The water coursed
through the streets,

surrounding Justino Bravo's
apartment building.

(JUSTINO SPEAKS SPANISH)

The flood water was demolishing

everything that stood
between it and the sea.

But water wasn't the only problem.

On the slopes above Los Corales,

the rainwater has dislodged soil
and rocks.

Now, the floods were thundering down
at up to 96km/h,

carrying uprooted trees,
huge chunks of debris

and boulders the size
of school buses.

They smashed their way
through buildings.

(JUSTINO SPEAKS SPANISH)

Justino Bravo's apartment
was also in the line of fire.

(JUSTINO SPEAKS SPANISH)

Mandy Donahue could only watch as
the flood waters reached her hotel.

The hotel was right on the beach,

and so everything in the city
was sort of flowing towards us.

The water began
to have a disastrous effect

on poorly built shantytowns
clinging to the mountain slopes.

We would hear
these sloughing sounds.

We realised that
what we must have been hearing

was the sound of these communities
built up the hill

that were now in rubble
at the bottom of the hill.

This swooshing sound was the sound
of these neighbourhoods

being wiped away.

When the flood waters
finally subsided,

Los Corales was buried under tonnes
of gigantic boulders.

Along 50km of coastline,

the water and debris had smashed
thousands of buildings into the sea.

30,000 people were killed.

But only a thousand bodies
were ever found.

The rest just disappeared
into the water.

150,000 people lost their homes.

Los Corales was literally
washed away.

Professor Carlos Anatias has studied
how something as simple as rain

can cause such devastation.

At the beginning, you have small
sediments, small particles,

but as it continues to rain heavily,

you have larger pieces of soil
that come down with the water.

And then, this kind of thick mixture
of solid and liquid

could move anything
that it could find on the way.

Especially, it could transport
rocks, heavy rocks.

Because it is so dense,
it could lift them easily.

The geography of Venezuela's
northern coast changed overnight.

The hillsides are scarred
where the soil was washed away.

An incredible 1.4 million
cubic metres of debris

was swept to the bottom
of the slopes,

in places up to ten metres deep.

Flash floods like this might strike
only twice in a century,

but in some parts of the world,

slow-rising floods
can be just as scary.

And they happen every year.

Slow-rising floods
can take days to develop,

and are much more predictable
than flash floods.

But there's no way to stop them
once they start.

Every spring, the water level
in the Mississippi

gradually rises until the riverbanks
can no longer contain it.

Satellite images reveal
the huge scale of the floods

that sweep over the Midwest
every year.

In 2008, heavy spring rains
caused the levels to rise

more than four metres above normal.

The Mississippi and its tributaries
overflowed their banks

and spread out over the flood plain.

Most people got out of the way,

but the damage to property, crops
and livestock came to $2.5 billion.

As the water fanned out
across eastern Iowa,

it could have filled 1.5 Olympic-size
swimming pools every second.

When it reached Cedar Rapids,

it inundated 23km sq of the city.

The flood took resident Lindsay
Janacek completely by surprise.

I've lived in Cedar Rapids
all my life around the Cedar River

and when I thought about a flood,

I was prepared for maybe
inches of water.

Instead, there was three metres
of water.

As it flowed
into downtown Cedar Rapids,

it surrounded 1,300 city blocks.

It demolished highways
and railway bridges,

and wrecked more than 5,000 homes.

Lindsay's house was one of them.

Oh, my God!

I knew it was going to be bad,

but when I walked in, I didn't
realise it would be that bad.

Oh, God! It's full of water.

And shoes.

I never would have imagined
walking into my home

and seeing the ceiling torn down
and the walls black with mud.

This is the stove.
It turned it over completely.

It took appliances
and turned them completely over,

and moved the dressers
across the room and...

I'm at a loss for words,
to be honest.

It's been my home,
it's part of who I am.

The Mississippi is the largest river
in the US.

At the mouth
of its 3,700km-long course,

the Mississippi fans out
into a delta.

And right in the middle
is the city of New Orleans.

In 1927, the river burst its banks
in a catastrophic flood.

It killed 500 people
and inundated nearly a million homes.

Many were in the poorest Ninth Ward

where authorities dynamited
the old levees

to prevent flooding
elsewhere in the city.

After that flood,
the army corps of engineers

built an elaborate system
of dykes and levees

to protect the city.

But it isn't just river water
that threatens New Orleans.

There are also storm surges from
hurricanes that slam into the coast.

The city is much more vulnerable
to floods from the sea

because the protective wetlands
around the city

have started to dry up and shrink.

80% of New Orleans
is now below sea level.

The lower Ninth Ward is on the
eastern side of New Orleans.

Here, the only thing
that separates the residents

from the water five metres above them
is this wall.

Robert Green lives here,

and he'd never thought
of the nearby canal as a threat.

We grew up loving the water,
we grew up fishing,

you know, so it never was
a sense of danger.

He's always lived
on Tennessee Street

in the heart of the neighbourhood.

A lot of children,
a lot of families,

a lot of fun going on.

Right now, you would have nothing
but noise from children.

Robert used to take care
of his three granddaughters.

My grandkids were always with me.

If you saw me, you saw them.

That's how they was - three sisters
together

with the old man to play with
sometimes.

Tennessee Street was just
two blocks away from the flood wall.

In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina
churned across the gulf

towards the Louisiana coast.

It pushed a 3.5-metre storm surge
up the Mississippi Delta,

testing the dykes and canals
that protected the city.

One of those canals channelled water

straight towards
the lower Ninth Ward.

*

As Hurricane Katrina
raged around them,

Robert Green and his family
had no choice

but to stay in their home
and take their chances.

As time passed on,
the weather changed,

I was listening to the wind,
listening to the rain,

and the water started
coming through.

The water from the hurricane
storm surge was beginning

to lap over the top
of the flood walls.

Another lower Ninth Ward resident,
Ernest Edwards,

knew this was a worrying sign.

You could see the water rising.

It came up to the top of the wall,

and I told my son, 'It's time to go
get on a bridge. It's time to run.'

We didn't have much time.

As he got to the bridge, water
was pouring over the flood walls

and eroding the foundations.

The lower Ninth Ward
was starting to fill up.

At about four o'clock
in the morning,

my brother said,
'Robert, we have water in the house.

We have to get to the roof.'

Just minutes after they reached
the roof,

the full force of the storm surge
smashed through the flood wall

and swept towards Tennessee Street.

It knocked Robert Green's house
clean off its foundations.

It literally pushed us
into the middle of the street.

Literally, our house floated
from 1826 Tennessee Street

down the street
and hit up against a tree.

I just felt this was it.

The impact threw his three-year-old
granddaughter off the roof.

She was lost in the dark
rushing water.

There was nothing I could have done
to save my granddaughter.

There was no sense in trying
to reach for her, she was gone.

She was washed away.

The odds were stacked against us,

the hole in the levee
and the water coming through

was so great that it just flushed
everything away.

As dawn broke, thousands of lower
Ninth Wall residents

were stranded on their roofs.

Robert and his two surviving
granddaughters were among them.

The sun came out,
the clouds were gone,

the wind was gone,
the rain was gone,

and in the distance,
we heard a boat.

It was Ernest Edwards.

He found Tennessee Street submerged
in 5.5 metres of water.

All the trees along that street
had people in them.

Now to stop loading up
and start riding.

I didn't stop riding

till seven o'clock that night,
picking up people.

Ernest Edwards literally
saved our lives

and probably 200, or even more than
that, people.

But there were many people
in the lower Ninth Ward

who couldn't be saved.

It was a sad day.

A whole lot of them died down there.

It was a sad, sad, sad situation.

The wall at the lower Ninth Ward
wasn't the only one that failed.

A total of 50 flood defences
were overwhelmed.

Over 700 people died,

and 370,000 were left homeless.

Damage was estimated
at $80 billion,

making it the costliest flood
in recorded history.

The power of floods
is unpredictable and deadly.

No matter where they come from
or why they begin,

floods are almost impossible
to control.

So next time it rains,
keep your eyes on the sky.

The world's deadliest natural
disaster could be on its way.

itfc subtitles

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