Standing Water and Flooded Crossings

The handbook's instruction is blunt: stay out of puddles — and it lists exactly why, because each reason is a different failure:

• A puddle can hide a large pothole that damages the vehicle, wrecks the suspension or flattens a tyre. You cannot see the bottom, so you do not know what you're driving into.
• The spray can splash pedestrians — inconsiderate at best, and on a road without a footpath it can push someone into traffic.
• Water can drown the engine and stall it, leaving you stopped in the worst possible place.
• Water makes your brakes less effective afterwards — the wet-brake effect from Brakes, which is why a few gentle applications to dry them out is the standard follow-up.

The harder case: flooded crossings. Kenyan roads flood at predictable points in the rains, and a flooded section is a genuinely different decision from a puddle. The rule is categorical:

Never drive into standing water of unknown depth.

Water deeper than expected stalls the engine — and moving water needs surprisingly little depth to float and sweep a vehicle, including large ones. There is no reliable way to judge depth by looking at the surface, and the fact that another vehicle got through tells you about their clearance, not yours, and about conditions that may have changed since.

Worked scenario. You're on Mombasa Road in heavy rain and reach a section with standing water about 30 cm deep. Stop before the water and assess rather than committing. 30 cm is already deep enough to reach the engine bay of most cars and enough for moving water to shift a vehicle. Turn around and find another route, or wait — flood water in the rains often drops within an hour. If you are already committed and the water is shallow and still, cross slowly in a low gear with steady revs and without stopping, then dry the brakes with gentle applications once clear.