You are spot on. Two drains run underneath a road and are both about 40cm in diameter. The water is about 5 - 6 feet deep and anyone getting caught in there wouldn't come out again. The water would pull them through a barbed-wire fence and into the drains. Someone with adult-sized shoulders would be stuck and drowned in one of the drain pipes.

In Australia they''re called "whirlies"

What is so odd also about the double whirlpools is the fact that one has a clockwise rotation while the other one has a counterclockwise rotation to it.

I love that they're spinning in opposite directions. Just neat to look at.

nice example of when a second vortex is nearby the other one will contra-rotate. (spin the opposite direction) this happens to less than 1% of all tornado systems, this little vid is a good insight to the forces that allow it to spin the other way.

It's cool how they spin in opposite directions :D

rotating in opposite directions.... soooo gooooood to the eyes!!

This istantly disproves the theory that water spins in different ways depending on which hemisphere your in... thank you for clearing that one up for me

They're rotating in opposite directions. That is funky!

Defies well known Coreolis Effect of fixed water rotation direction below the equator. ALL of Australia is below the equator so this should not happen, but is happening.

He should have stuck something light in there to test it out

There is some wisdom on this site. This is very important information: "... the whirlpools led straight down about one and a half metres and then across for about a metre. There were two large drainage pipes running underneath a road. ...Each whirlpool led into one pipe." That is a common phenomenon, and is the same as any bathtub vortex. It is an instability - the direction of rotation is random. This comment: "Coriolis has absolutely no effect at that tiny scale" is quite right.

Really cool. I could watch that for a while, lol. I just wonder where that water was going.

it doesn't usually rain in Australia but when it does... it floods the place 6 ft under waster and creates dual whirl pools.

Whoa! They're like feeding of each other. So cool.

Too Cool! They are not even going in the same direction. One is going clockwise and the other is going counter clockwise.