The Nashville Flood: It was a Dark and Stormy Night

It was a dark and stormy night.

No, really.  It was.

Rain pelted on the roof all day, lightning tore through the sky, the thunder rumbled so loudly it shook your bones, and our dog sat strangely still in the corner.  I’d watched the television all day, but by evening the kids and I switched to a movie.  My husband was away in Boston.

“Aren’t you watching the news?” a neighbor called past ten o’clock to make sure I knew tornados had been spotted above middle Tennessee.  Make that our county. More specifically, our neighborhood.

“Tornados will be above your road at 10:14," my dad reported over the phone after watching the satellite.  My next door neighbor was out of town and young babysitters were watching her  children.  I had just a few minutes to get over to her house, hoping to provide some sort of comfort to the situation.  Before running out the door, my son grabbed a flashlight, my daughter grabbed a teddy bear, and I grabbed my iPhone, my iPad, and my MacBook.

Should we hide under a desk? What do you do if you don't have a basement?  Bathtub? Stop, drop, and roll?  I was supposed to be the adult, so the kids, two frightened babysitters and I waited out the storm by singing songs and reading books.

It turned out to be “the worst disaster to strike the region since the Civil War,” dumping 13 inches of rain, killing thirty-one people and destroying thousands of houses.  People were without power, water, or other basic services and 52 of our 95 counties were designated as federal disaster areas. Floodwater raced and settled into populated areas, including downtown Nashville, whose residents had not been forewarned that a dam could give way.  A community of one hundred and forty homeless people living under interstate underpasses was swept away, though they reported no deaths.

Patten Fuqua, a blogger who writes about Nashville’s hockey team, took a moment and wrote about the flood:

"Parts of Nashville that could never even conceivably be underwater were underwater. Some of them still are. Opry Mills and the Opryland Hotel are, for all intents and purposes, destroyed. People died sitting in standstill traffic on the Interstate. We saw boats going down West End."

What’s that?  You say you hadn’t heard?

The national media, which typically seems eager to cover these types of events, paid very little attention to our plight.  Why?  There were two other big stories of the time-frame -- the failed Times Square car bomb and an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.  At one point, my husband – stranded in the airport and trying desperately to get information about our area – turned on CNN to see several reporters huddled around an oil-covered jellyfish.  Newspapers featured seagulls daily while our flooding merited single-column stories on the last page of sections nobody reads.  Nashville was underwater, the death toll was climbing, and the Nashville economy is taking a $1.5 billion hit. (Not to mention the rest of the region.)

“It seems bizarre that no one seems to be aware that we just experienced what is quite possibly the costliest non-hurricane disaster in American history,” Fuqua wrote.

“But let’s look at the other side of the coin for a moment. A large part of the reason that we are being ignored is because of who we are. Think about that for just a second. Did you hear about looting? Did you hear about crime sprees? No…you didn’t. You heard about people pulling their neighbors off of rooftops. You saw a group of people trying to move two horses to higher ground. No…we didn’t loot. Our biggest warning was, “Don’t play in the floodwater.” When you think about it…that speaks a lot for our city. A large portion of why we were being ignored was that we weren’t doing anything to draw attention to ourselves. We were handling it on our own.”

There’s a lot to be said for self-sufficiency. However, news of the flooding could help Tennessee get much-needed funds for rebuilding and recovery efforts. Americans everywhere would probably happily donate to us as eagerly as they did for other natural disasters.  Of course, they’d have to know that a disaster actually happened and we honestly needed it.

It was a dark and stormy night.

No, really. It was.