A woman’s car was carried away by flash floods, and that turned out to be only the start of her problems.
Anna Brooks found her vehicle up to the bumper in water – with three parking tickets on the windshield.
The resident of Charleston, South Carolina, said her car was pushed only a short distance from where she parked and wound up in a tow-away zone.
‘To the individual who gave me parking tickets, my car floated here,’ said Brooks in a video she shared on TikTok a couple weeks ago that has gone viral.
Her caption read, ‘I can’t control where it washes ashore,’ and included a crying face emoji.
Thunderstorms and heavy rain pounded Charleston in mid-August and flooded streets in the downtown. Several roads were closed and photos showed vehicles stranded in water. The storms moved slowly, prolonging the precipitation to the area. Officials discouraged people from traveling.
The area where Brooks parked received 11 inches of rain in just two days.
Brooks, who is attending medical school, said she left her car on a side street that was a close walk to her classroom.
‘I kind of had to say, “Where’s my car?” she told FOX Weather on Thursday.
‘I found it. And then suddenly there were parking tickets, which were not great.’
Brooks said she later realized that other people didn’t take the spots because the road is prone to flooding.
‘I think people think that my car literally was like a boat,’ she said.
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‘It really only floated just a couple of feet, but by the time I got to my car, it was bobbing up and down.’
Brooks’ problems grew as her car was totaled and got impounded by the city before her insurance company was able to retrieve it.
She appealed all three parking tickets and managed to get two of them rescinded.
Brooks called it all ‘definitely a crazy experience’.
About 12 inches of floodwater can move a mid-sized vehicle, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the US’s agency responsible for responding to domestic disasters.
It happened more than 11 years after a Ferrari that was squashed by a lorry backing up in New York City’s Upper West Side was slapped with a parking ticket.
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