One of the most dangerous things you can do, no matter the size of your vehicle is to drive it across or through deep water, especially if there is any sort of current. In this case we have a Russian Ural truck, much like the one we showed you last weekend converted into a tracked fire fighting rig. This time we have wheels on it  and some sort of a people carrier on the back. That is important to note because this thing isn’t filled with Vodka (maybe the driver is) but it is filled with people. That makes the whole scene all that much more butt puckering when the truck gets into the deep juice on the “near” side of the river.

These big trucks are insanely capable and have been in production for some 40 years now. Simple as a hammer they will take a lot of abuse and punishment but even they are no match for the forces of nature.  As the driver starts to cross the river he is in the shallow water and things seem to be pretty tame. It is when you see the nose of the truck climb up on a small ridge of rocks that things start to get interesting. As the nose of the truck splashes down it becomes immediately evident that this is no shallow little stream.

The driver pulls straight in and with the truck completely broadside to the water, things get weird. It looks as though the whole rig is going to be swept down stream until the guy makes the decision to lessen the area the water has to push on by steering the truck up river. Doing that totally saved everyone’s bacon because if that thing got pushed completely loose and shoved down stream it would likely have turned over and everyone inside it would have been in very big trouble. It looks like there are kids peeking out the windows and junk which is just creepy as hell.

But hey, all is well that ends well, right? We wouldn’t want to be the next truck in line. This is high stakes poker!

Press play below and watch this big Ural truck NEARLY get swept away –