I think this might be one of the most arrogant and carbrained things I’ve ever seen. These people launch (working!) cars off of a cliff into what should’ve been a pristine riverbank, complete with leaking oil and fuel and fluids, for…fun? And they cut down over a thousand trees to do it?
What about cleanup? They claim they “meticulously” clean everything up afterwards but…how? How do they retrieve every single piece of debris, every shard of metal and plastic and glass, every single square millimeter of contaminated soil after this?
You know, at least in my area, when they wheel a vehicle out onto the ice in winter to gamble about when it’ll fall through in spring, they strip out all the fuel lines and interiors and stuff and just leave the shit frame, and the cars themselves don’t work prior to being selected for this. I’m pretty sure they also retrieve them afterwards.
Could they do something better with the thing? Almost certainly. But at least it’s not… as bad as launching fully functional cars into a river just for funsies…
Why the hell does your area just regularly let a car break through the ice?
According to the novel American Gods it’s a discreet way to dispose of the bodies.
No one expects them to be hidden in plain sight inside the klunker in the middle of the ice, no one’s going to risk walking there and possibly drowning, and once it drops no one’s going to dive to the bottom of the lake to find the skeletons in the old klunkers from previous years.
My local police does have a dive team, or at least access to one, but i could see that being harder to do in the past.
The culture may have been different then, but in my area fishermen will often go out before the ice is driveable. The smart ones wear some kind of floatation device. The younger fishermen would probably go check out the car during a slow part of the day, maybe see if some cool stuff is left behind or take some cool photos of it.
Honestly I don’t know. It’s a yearly thing though in several places I know of. They have contests (usually through local tv stations) to guess the date it’ll fall through and stuff. People bet on it.
It may have to do with the fact that a lot of people go ice fishing so we regularly hear about big trucks falling through the ice, so it’s something to keep people aware of the danger…? Or rural folks might just find that fun, idk.
As someone who fishes, it could be many things. First, if they leave them, they serve as great fish habitat. Fish don’t have eyelids, so somewhere to find shade during the sunniest bits of the day is great. And it breaks down into rust over time.
It could be for rescue diver practice. Sinking most of a vehicle to go mess with in a controlled setting is better than learning on an actual rescue.
And if this happens a bunch with bets and all, it could be a way of gauging when it is no longer safe to be out on the ice like you said. It’s always a gamble anyways, but that is pretty solid evidence of how safe it is if you know that body of water.
But it could just be redneck bullshittery. “The South” is anywhere 20 minutes outside of any major city in the USA. Go drive around and look, I promise it works. That’s how you get shit like this. They are everywhere.