My brush with disaster, what kind of sign is it?

[Pittshark]

!! Alert: Lengthy Story !!

Had a scary experience over the weekend. Me, my girlfriend and two other friends went to Columbus, OH for the weekend to visit another friend (we all live in Pittsburgh, PA). I got suckered into driving at the last minute, but whatever, no big deal. We had a good time all weekend, until late day Sunday. The plan was to get our stuff together at my buddy's place, then all go out for dinner, then we were gonna head back home. Well while we were at his place getting packed up, the sky opened up and it starting pouring about as hard as I've seen in a long time. When it finally lightened up, we packed up my car and headed out. Shortly after we pulled out of his plan, the torrential downpour started again, visibility was really bad. When pulled into the plaza where the restaurant was, I was slowing driving along the storefronts looking for row to turn up when it happened. Because of the poor visibility, I never even saw flooded area right in front of me, and proceeded to drive right into a pool of water close to 2 feet deep. A wave of water came up higher than the hood and the windows. My xD shut down immediately and would not start again.

Fortunately my friends wasted no time taking of their shoes, wading in the almost knee deep water and pushing it out and up to a non-flooded parking spot. I was in shock initially, because...naturally, I feared the worst. That one reason why so many say they won't bother with a CAI...that I proclaimed I don't think I'll ever have a problem with....had just happened....hydrolock, engine gone.

We practically swum our way into the restaurant and started talking about what we may be looking at and what we're going to do. Fortunately my buddy who lives there is an airline mechanic and is pretty handy around a car as well. Once we got a little food in us and let the storm pass we got out there and popped the hood. We decided the best thing to do first was to get anything electronic dried as best we can and to get the spark plugs out to see if there was water down there. That turned out to be quite a process in it's own because I forgot that our plugs require a 9/16" plug socket. After some running around and a trip to the hanger my friend works at to get tools we eventually got the plugs pulled. No signs of water anywhere. Then came the moment of truth....he said to try to crank the engine because if it does anything at all it'll tell us something, and if there's any water down in there you should see something come out of the plug wells. Turned the key and to my relief the engine tried to turn over. Of course it wouldn't start, but as soon as I heard the noise I knew I had somehow avoided hydrolock, because otherwise we wouldn't hear or see anything. No water appeared around the plug area either. We were gonna throw new plugs in but naturally the Auto Zone nearby did not have any in stock, so we cleaned up the ones that were in there and reinstalled.

We proceeded to spend the rest of the evening right into the nighttime trying some different things to get it running. Pulled the intake from the valve and (still fortunately) did not see any water. We got to one point where we were pretty convinced that there just simply wasn't enough juice in the battery to get a spark, but even after a considerable amount of jumping we still got nothing. Finally hit a point where we decided that there was nothing else we could do that night. We all stayed again that night, all had to call off work yesterday. The last resort was to go out there again in the morning and try again, see if giving time to dry out more would be enough, and if we still got nothing then it was start calling around and praying I found someone that could look at it that day. We hooked the jumpers back up, let it charge for a little bit then started trying again. It was finally getting closer to turning over. We still had the intake off as we were trying some short sprays of starter fluid into the valve while cranking it. Finally it started turning over and then shutting back off immediately. At this time I noticed a stream of water coming out of the tail pipe. Then my buddy told me to slide the intake back on and give it a go. Did that, and to my incredible relief it turned over and stayed running. Water absolutely shot out of the exhaust pipe at this time. Tightened the intake back on and let it run for awhile. Drove it back to his place with no problems and just continued letting it run. We went to the gas station and put a fresh tank in. Obviously let it shut down for the first time since we got it running. Checked the oil multiple times and everything looked fine, no milky look at all that would indicate any water mixed in. Again, to my relief, no problem starting back up. We made the drive back home (approx. 3hrs) without any issues. I plan to get a few things taken care of this week to be safe (oil change, flush, possibly a tune up) but there appears to be no real problems. I've noticed a noise when I turn the wheel hard to the right, but it doesn't seem to be anything major and I'll have my mechanic take a look if it persists.

So if you've read this far, perhaps you can give me your opinions on my dilemma. After this experience and thinking about how close I came to potentially destroying my engine, my immediate reaction was "I need to ditch this CAI and go back to either the stock box or to the DIY short ram I still have." But then I thought about it and it occurred to me, "well if I can end up in water so deep that it temporarily shuts down some of my electronics but does not sucked in by the intake, then that filter must awfully well protected and practically impossible to get flooded." So what do you think? Is it a sign that I should feel pretty safe with this intake, or should I say 'it's not worth it' and take the thing out? It's a DC Sports model, which is a solid product for a tremendous price, but it would still bum me out a little to take it out after only about a year.

Thanks if you read this whole thing, and happy to hear what anyone thinks.