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nashville flooding

This past weekend, the Nashville/middle TN area had record rains and record flooding. Rivers overflowed, houses were destroyed, damage estimated in the billions occurred. All this you can get from the news. But something gets lost when you are viewing the mass devastation on TV. Something that I was only able to start to comprehend by getting down in it and seeing what it has done to one specific family.

A lady I work with and her husband had the first floor of their home underwater this weekend. I was able to go and help with some of the cleanup yesterday. I wasn’t sure what to expect, I’ve never seen flood damage first hand.

As we drove up to their street, I was wondering if we were in the right place. All the houses on the adjoining streets were fine. I saw a guy getting home from work, getting his newspaper and going inside. As we turned onto the flood damaged street it was like entering another world. The yards were full of debris: construction trash, ruined furniture, destroyed possessions, limbs, fences. It felt like driving through a tornado ravaged neighborhood, I didn’t notice that all the structures were in tact because of all the carnage in the front yards.

By the time we got there, all the furniture had been removed from the first floor, as it was all completely destroyed. Our friends had ripped down the wet drywall and insulation, so we hauled it out of the house. We ripped out the kitchen cabinets and tore up the flooring. Most of their privacy fence had been ripped right out of the ground by the force of the flood waters, cement post footers and all, so we cleaned up as much of that as we could find along with their destroyed patio furniture and debris that had settled in their back yard.

Being in one of the actual homes damaged by this flood with the homeowners brought the devastation to a level of reality for me that I didn’t understand before. Looking around, the place barely even resembled a house anymore. Walls were kicked out, exposing the framing. Everything was wet and smelly. And our friends had to look at it and be reminded of how nice things were just a few days earlier. I know if it were me, I’d have a lot of “why” questions, and would just want to turn the clock back and wish it had never happened. It would be very hard to be motivated to work on it.

I was tired after the back-breaking work, and looked forward to going home to shower and relax. These folks were undoubtedly far more tired than I was, but didn’t have the luxury of leaving it behind them and going home (a coworker of mine put them up in a rental house they had available, but it’s not home).

The good part is that my company has really rallied around them to try to take care of them in every way possible. The Nashville community has shown why Tennessee is called the Volunteer state, and I’m seeing this for the first time as a relatively recent Nashville transplant. That said, I don’t want to be one of those people who uses the positive stories of help and good deeds to make myself feel better, then goes on happily with my life while the flood victims still have to get up tomorrow to the reality that their lives have been drastically changed. The struggle will be ongoing for them, and the effects of this disaster are going to be felt for a long time. The course of many lives have been permanently altered because of it.

Thursday, May 6th, 2010 at 6:01 pmand is filed under Random. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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