Hurricane Hilary was downgraded to a tropical storm when it made landfall in Mexico on Saturday, but the torrential downpour that the storm brought caused chaos throughout the country nonetheless. Jalisco was hit with heavy rain on Sunday, flooding the streets of Guadalajara and nearby cities. In Zapopan, floodwaters dragged a giant water tank through a major avenue before sending the tank, or tinaco, careening into a city bus. And the memes have been spicy.
No one was hurt in the the unlikely traffic accident — including the bus and water tank, which bounced off the public transportation vehicle leaving behind little more than scrapes and scuffs. Watch the crash, courtesy of El Universal:
Even in a tropical storm, Mexico has zero chill, and social media users took to platforms like Instagram, Twitter and TikTok to joke about the water tank.
These gravity drained tanks are commonly used throughout Mexico as water storage. Homes and business use these tanks — many of them made by Rotoplas and bearing its logo — to hold water in cases of emergency. Think of the humongous water towers in American cities, but on a much smaller scale. Their capacity can reach 10,000 liters, or about 2,642 gallons, in some cases. Tanks that hold that much water can reach about 2.9 meters, or 9.5 feet, in height. That’s likely how tall the tank in the video was, given the height of most city buses being just under 10 feet.
These tanks most commonly sit on rooftops, so you can guess why seeing one of these giant containers floating through a major street would have been unusual. It turns out the Rotoplas tank had sat on the sidewalk, precariously tied to a street lamp prior to the storm; the rain that Hilary deposited proceeded to flood the streets of Zapopan, dragging cars and reportedly undoing the tank’s tether.
The running water then led the tank on a merry tour of the avenue in the Greater Guadalajara area — the capital is the birthplace of Checo Pérez, by the way. It wasn’t long before memes flooded social media and news outlets picked up on the road-going water tank that crashed into the bus.
News anchors remarked that the tank was drunk, and that the bus passengers would have a hard time explaining to their bosses that they were late to work after crashing into a water tank. But the tank was found to be at fault because it was traveling against traffic on a one way.