Nobody wanders around the gator and snake infested pond behind their Florida house.

Native Floridian. I spent my youth shoeless around these ponds, catching and releasing gators, snakes, and fish. I find those experiences growing up invaluable.

One man's trash is another man's treasure.

Inland coastal Alabama, same deal. It's great to know how to catch turtles, snakes and lizards with my bare hands. Doesn't come up much while developing software but it definitely balanced out the Super Nintendo time growing up.

Australian here. Catching a snake here has you limping home as fast as possible to get to the hospital before rigor mortis sets in.

I’ve done other things that almost got me killed but nothing gives me the heebeejeebees like thinking about the time I drunkenly peed into a river delta near daintree. I don’t even want to think about what was waiting for me to step closer to the water...

Native Floridian here as well. Same, but I would never swim down into a submerged car to investigate it. They're usually far too disgusting and too deep down. There was a submerged car in a canal where I grew up, I used to use it as a landmark for fishing all the time. It's probably still there, who knows, there could be a body.

The first time I heard of "Florida Man", I thought that shit was made up. Now I'm incredibly fascinated (and perhaps a bit scared) by it.

The "Florida Man" phenomenon is likely due more to reporting laws in Florida than it is to the culture in Florida:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_information_legisla...

https://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/how-floridas-proud-open-g...

Is that why fark has a Florida tag?

As someone who used to be a Floridian, tales of gators in ponds are greatly exaggerated :) The vast majority of ponds, especially community ponds, do not have gators.

Snakes? Another story.

> The vast majority of ponds, especially community ponds, do not have gators.

The need for this qualification on your statement really isn't helping. /s

Yea, local sterotypes tend to be that way, Boston is actually a really nice city with (mostly, except the crazy insulated catholics) pleasant people.

I don't know anything about Florida. Why would developers choose to build suburbs with ponds in areas like that?

1) dig pond for drainage, retention, and fill dirt

2) use fill dirt to raise land for houses so they are above flood levels

3) sell houses with "waterfront views"

On 3, this leads to this "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotonda_West,_Florida" hilarious suburban development, complete with inaccessible canals

Corrected link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotonda_West,_Florida

Empty page

That place is beautiful.

They are retention ponds, it’s necessary to create areas where water can drain into.

A large part of Florida is the combination of coastal and at sea level.

People want to live there, so they actively and continuously drain the swamp and build wherever possible.

Sea level rise is posing some expensive problems for them, obviously.

They dig the pond and use the dirt as fill to build houses on at a higher level than sea level.

Florida has unusual issues. The groundwater isn't very far below the surface and you basically can't have basements there. Some parts of it are swamp and it has a lot of karst that is prone to sink holes.

(Off the top of my head -- so anyone more knowledge, feel free to nitpick that to death. Alternately, anyone desperate to pick a fight and not knowledgeable enough, feel free to google my remark to within an inch of its life.)

imagine the smell and mosquitoes

Don't worry, the heat and humidity will distract you from both.

Most ponds don't smell.

Does the water drain, evaporate, or just stagnate?

It probably wasn't visible from ground level. If it's five feet below the surface but 30 feet from shore, then your line of sight would pass through a bit more than 30 feet of water, and the pond is muddy enough that it's partly obscured even from directly above. If no one happened to swim or boat directly over it, and with no tall buildings nearby, there may have been no opportunity to see it.

(I've noticed something similar flying over the Great Lakes. Looking down from the window of a descending plane, you can clearly make out lakefloor contours that are invisible from shore, even with the relatively clear water.)

Also the Fresnel reflection coefficient comes into play [0]: water surface has higher reflectivity at grazing-incidence angles than at those close to the surface normal.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresnel_equations

If you live anywhere near nature (park, woods, ...) there are things decomposing near where you live. Raccoons, squirrels, ...

A corpse is not going to decompose over the span of 22 years; it's pretty much done within the first year.

From the article:

When the vehicle was pulled from the water, skeletal remains were found inside. One week later the remains were positively identified as belonging to Mr Moldt.

Decomposing is typically only in reference to tissues/organs/soft matter. Things that bacteria, insects, and animals can eat (thus causing the decomposition). This happens rather quickly.

Bone can't be eaten, so when all that is left is the Skeleton there is no more decoposing. As long as they aren't crushed or destroyed through other means, bones will last virtually forever.

I assume he was identified by dental records or something similar (healed broken bones, etc).

> Bone can't be eaten

Squirrels eat bones. Skeletons disappear rapidly in the wild.

Neither the squirrels nor the bone-eating fish were able to get through the car doors.

TIL. Thanks squirrels for keeping our parks/woods/neighborhodos free of dead animal carcasses :)

> bones will last virtually forever

Ironically, like plastic. :)

Could you imagine going out for a simple swim, diving down for fun, and stumbling across a car with a rotting corpse in it? There's the reason why I don't like swimming in deep water.

It's a man made pond in Florida, it's not deep at all. Definitely not something you'd swim in though, lots of funky stuff grows in warm stagnant water like that, plus ever present alligators.

Visiting friends in Florida recently, they warned our kids not to go in the landscaped pond in their development (it had a beach). I asked if snakes were a danger. They laughed, not in the least: the real problem was flesh-eating amoebae.

You mean brain eating amoebas right?

There is brain eating amoebas and flesh eating bacteria. You pick.

You might be right. Maybe I got splashed...

Ugh I thought that was amusing, at least until I read yesterday about a 10 year old girl in Texas who died from exactly this.

The amoeba is called Naegleria Fowleri and nagelerisis is a terrifying way to die: even with treatment there's a 95% mortality rate.

The amoebas enter the nose when they traverse the olfactory nerve via something called the cribriform plate to enter the brain. Once there, they mistake neurons for bacteria, which they consume.

Lots of funky stuff. Don’t let your dogs swim in those ponds either.

Maybe they should go somewhere nice instead of a swamp though

I wonder how close he lived. That definitely does not look like a street you'd be just passing through.

If he lived on that street or a connecting street then you can see how he might drive right into that pond if he fell asleep (from all those drinks at the club) right before making that turn.

Good point, but why oh why didn't the police think to check the ponds years ago?

They probably looked a bit, but missing persons cases don't usually get satellite fly-bys.

I thought about that as well. I guess there are any number of answers and maybe they did check the ponds and couldn't see anything -- it was visible on google maps for 12 years and nobody spotted it so it couldn't have been that easy to see from the shore.

Other comments reveal that, in fact, this is inside a gated community. Driving your car into a gated community and then into a pond just doesn't add up as an accident.

http://charleyproject.org/case/william-earl-moldt says he disappeared while the the gated community was under development

Ah, OK; well that paints a bit of a different picture: driving through some construction site which might have been in who knows what sort of disarray at the time, without proper roads and hazards/obstacles and whatnot.

He was a mortgage broker. I wonder if he had an active deal, or looking to buy property there.

Yeah that sounds a bit like some Hot Fuzz, "The Greater Good" level stuff going on.