Plumbing The Depths

Florida is a never ending source of the strange and wonderful of human behaviour .....

Large Storm Drains Are Ubiquitous In The USA

I have to suspect its the heat, malaria carrying mosquito's, lack of free psychiatric help and drugs.

Anyway, the latest news report to attract my attention was that of a lady who may well push most of those buttons .... Lyndsey Kennedy is a 43 year old woman, who has an attraction to the storm drains that are a feature of many areas in the USA. 

THEM - Used The Storm Drains To Move Around

They are often also the home of rats and alligators, and apparently giant ants in the 1950's (I saw the films of it ... honest!!) ..... so usually to be avoided.

Such is this attraction that she has had to be rescued from them on three occasions and counting .... The first occasion was in March 2021 when the Delray Beach Police Department in Florida, reported that the fire department had  rescued Ms Kennedy from a storm drain. She had been reported as missing by her boyfriend three weeks prior to her rescue ..... She informed her rescuers that she had decided to go swimming in a canal near her boyfriend’s house on March the 3rd, but that after noticing a doorway in the shallow part of the canal, she entered, spotted a tunnel and followed it, and others until she became lost.

Lyndsey Kennedy Attracted To Storm Drains

She told the police she had been walking in the sewer system for about three weeks, living off an unopened can of ginger ale she found in the drain while looking for a way out. She stopped walking in the area of West Atlantic Avenue and SW 11th Avenue, because she could see light and people walking past her above. Her cries for help attracted a female passerby who called the fire department ..... the police at the time said that Kennedy had “appeared to be coherent” and didn’t need to be 'Baker Acted' (involuntarily institutionalised). A detective wrote in the report that she had gone missing “under similar circumstances” in April 2020.

Kennedy was rescued again from a storm drain for the second time in May 2021, in Grand Prairie, Texas, after she had reportedly wandered off from a rehab facility after checking in. Police in the town were searching for four days, before her mother and best friend found her at a canal, but when police began to approach her, she went into a nearby storm drain and disappeared. Her family had installed a tracking app on her cell-phone, which allowed them to find confirm her last location before she went underground. Her family and friends then reportedly dropped bags of food and Gatorade into manholes in the area of her disappearance, before she was eventually rescued.

Her story didn't end there, she was reported as being  arrested in Palm Beach County, Florida, in July 2021 after she almost ran over the store’s clerk, who had chased her outside after she stole beer, then she ran several red lights before crashing into a car. Deputies said she ran from the crash scene to an apartment complex, but staff led them to her. Her passenger (who had been left injured in the crashed vehicle), told police that Ms Kennedy had run off as she had no valid driving licence .... police later confirmed that her driving license had been suspended 17 times from 2007 to 2020.

The latest rescue occasion was on January the 18th 2023, after a report of a woman, possibly in distress, swimming in a canal near the 500 block of Lindell Boulevard. police identified Ms Kennedy and asked her if she needed assistance, but she ignored them, and climbed into a storm drain pipe. She then refused to come out and even began crawling farther into the culvert pipe, before Firefighters were able to block her between two sections of pipe, while the Delray Beach Fire Rescue Special Operations Team utilised a ladder and a rescue harness to pull her out. She had some minor injuries and was treated at the scene before being transported to a hospital for further evaluation.

When contacted, her mother, said she has a history of mental illness, is a frequent user of illegal narcotics including opoids, heroin and methadone, and has a history of doing “odd things” and “making bad decisions.” ... that's an understatement.