The call that sticks with me came in September 2022, a little after nine at night. Guy in a Camry on I-95 south, right at the Thurbers Avenue curve near Exit 16 in Cranston. He'd driven into what looked like a shallow puddle under the overpass. By the time he called me the water was up over his door sills and he was standing on the shoulder in the rain, soaked, watching his car sit there like a boat that forgot how to float.
He did everything right except the one thing. He got out. He didn't try to be a hero. But he never should have driven into it in the first place, and I want to talk about why that spot, and a handful of others around Providence, fill up the way they do.
The roads that go under first
If you've driven this city for a few winters and summers you already know the pattern, but here's the short list of where cars get stranded when the sky opens up:
- The Thurbers Avenue curve on I-95 south, near Exit 16 in Cranston. It sits low and the drains under there clog fast.
- The 6-10 Connector, where Route 6 and Route 10 knot together. They rebuilt it recently and it still pools in a hard rain.
- Route 10 through Cranston and Elmwood.
- I-195 west in East Providence, around Exit 2.
- Allens Avenue, the industrial waterfront strip, which floods from rain and from the harbor pushing the other way.
The thing that ties them together is drainage. When you get more than about five inches of rain in a single hour, no storm drain in this city keeps up. The water has nowhere to go, the grates choke on leaves and road grit, and RIDOT crews end up out there in the middle of it trying to clear drains by hand. In August and again in September of 2022 those exact roads, I-95, Route 10, I-195, shut down entirely. It wasn't a fluke. It's the geography.
Never drive into standing water. I mean it.
You cannot tell how deep it is. That's the whole problem. Water on a road at night, with rain on your windshield and headlights bouncing off the surface, looks like six inches whether it's six inches or three feet. And it doesn't take three feet. A foot of moving water will lift most cars enough to float them sideways, and once you're floating you're a passenger, not a driver.
If the road ahead is covered, turn around. Find another way. Route 146, the Wampanoag Trail, surface streets, whatever gets you home dry. Before you leave the house in a bad storm, check the travel advisories RIDOT posts at dot.ri.gov. They close these roads for a reason, and the reason is usually that somebody's already stuck.
When it's already too late
Say you misjudged it and the water's rising around the car. Here's the order of operations: get out while you still can open the door. Water pressure against a submerged door makes it nearly impossible to push open, so don't wait to see how bad it gets. Leave the car. Do not go back for it. A vehicle is a thing you can replace. Get to high ground and call for help from there, not from behind the wheel.
How the recovery actually works
People assume a flooded car gets yanked out with a chain while the water's still up. It doesn't work like that, and it shouldn't. We wait for the water to drop. Pulling a car out of moving floodwater is dangerous for the operator and it tends to tear the car up worse than the flood did.
Once it recedes, this is almost always a flatbed job. A car that's been sitting in water has a seized or soaked drivetrain, and a lot of the older cars around here already have salt-rotted frames and undercarriages from Rhode Island winters, so you can't safely hook-and-chain them. AWD vehicles, the Subarus everybody up here drives, need a flatbed anyway or you'll wreck the transmission. We winch it up onto the deck, get it out clean, and get it somewhere it can dry out and be looked at.
We cover this whole corridor, both sides of the line. If you're out toward the East Bay in Barrington or Bristol when a storm comes through, or over the Massachusetts line in Attleboro, we can get to you, though a heads up: Attleboro's a different state with its own towing rules, so don't assume the Rhode Island rates apply out there.
The Camry, by the way, came back fine after it dried out and got a once-over. The guy was more shaken than the car. If you're reading this from the shoulder of a flooded road right now, stop reading and call us. Then wait somewhere dry, uphill, away from the car. That's the part that matters. The rest is our job.
And when the weather's clear and you just want to know who's picking up the phone before you need us, that's what the rest of this site is for.