500 Year Flood

I know it's been FOREVER since I put in a blog post. Crazy busy. My first post was supposed to be the cruise photos I haven't put up. I put them on facebook, but Mike says that isn't good enough! Well, Taryn and I had a wonderful time, but we didn't take very many photos!! I accidentally left her camera at preschool and the camera we took didn't work. The few photos we got on it are stuck forever inside unless we can find someone with a docking station for that camera. Bummer. But we loved every minute of it. I am really glad we didn't put it off until after graduation now that the Gulf of Mexico has suffered the terrible oil spill. The water was sooo blue and beautiful!

Mike is picking Indy up at Mercer today and I need to go get things ready for her, and we have a Mother-Daughter Ice Cream at the ward and a Spring Fling social at Church of Good Shepherd to attend. By the time we do both, they will be close to being home. Indy will only be here 1 week, so I don't want to miss it! Too bad preschool isn't out yet and I have to work all next week :(

I've been very remiss on blogging. I tried to get caught up on all the family blogs and enjoyed reading and seeing your photos. I didn't comment because I was just too far behind! I kept hoping I would have a weekend free, but projects interfere, illness, or something else happens every single time. Luckily I got all our planting done, and the creek bed dredged before the Great Flood hit! Actually, we had two repeat weekends of lots of rain and that is part of why there was such damage. I kind of wondered why I felt so compelled to clean a ditch after the storm from the previous weekend before the flooding weekend...now I know why. It really isn't like me to climb around in that kind of muck. Especially after seeing two centipedes in there. Ewww. I had over a dozen piles of leaves when I was done. And a couple weeks before, my mom had cleaned out fall leaves from another section and had filled several bags. Good thing we followed those promptings. If that water had jumped the ditch, and if it had been higher than 2 feet, we like to tease my mom that her bedroom might not have been here when she returned home from San Diego!

There is rain in the forecase for this weekend, but I'm looking at blue skies right now...keep your fingers crossed!

http://www.millennialstar.org/ click on Just in Case You Missed It
My friend Joanna blogs for Millennial Star. She did such a nice job summarizing last weekend's flood with a photo blog that I am linking it for any who would like to view it. I am always impressed with her blogs at MS - she is so good at it! Joanna is a great friend and I was glad that the 5 mile creek tributary to the Harpeth River didn't reach their house. There's a cool photo of her swing set before it was covered completely and swept across the yard. I'm pretty sure she got it back. It's nice to live on a hill.

We found that to be the case as well. Except when your foundation has a wet springs running under it and some drainage issues that have to be addressed. We do have some very costly structural damage that we will have to get fixed from movement at our foundation. Our third expert came out yesterday and found even more damage than the first two. It didn't all happen from the 15" of rain, however this past weekend couldn't have helped it any.

My take on the event:
Starting Saturday morning around 9 am, the rains came fast and fierce. Lots of lightning. We had a large barrel that filled up once = 10 inches and then again halfway. 15 inches of rain in a little over 24 hrs. Massive flooding and most of Middle Tennessee is now declared disaster areas. Tornado sirens went off Sunday. Knowing that would be the case and the energy in the atmosphere made Saturday night/Sunday morning the most dangerous time, I had Taryn, Gib and Mariah sleep downstairs that night. We were spared. Many others were not.

I figured it would be covered on national news but about a week later I got a frantic call from a friend who just heard about it and thought we might be under water. Well, not quite, many were and still are, we are on high ground at our house but it was intense. A short drive down the hill to the mall exactly 1 mile from our house and cars were covered to their windows and some to their roof tops. The freeway in our part of town was closed with 2 feet of water on it. Other parts of Nashville were much worse. Lives were lost in the flood. Nothing is worse than that and my heart goes out to those families. A coworkers dad is friends with someone swept off his feet and killed in the flood waters. A friend of our family from the Scout troop lost her nephew, a 21 yr old with 2 boys, age 1 and 2, when he tried to walk home because his boys were with a babysitter. He too was swept away and drowned.

A home in one of my co-workers neighborhood exploded and caught the houses on either side on fire. Firefighters couldn't get to it because there was no way in or out - their neighborhood had literally become an island and parts were so deep you could only see the top couple inches of the basketball poles. Luckily, the family whose house exploded from the gas leak had already been evacuated. A family in one of the houses on the other side had to escape when their house caught on fire.

A preschool boy's family was trying to get home from about 45 minutes south. I'm sure it took alot longer with every major road and interstate closing faster than you could keep track of it due to flash flooding. Tornado sirens were going off everywhere. They tried a back route to their house and came face to face with a tornado on the ground. The little boy says it looked like Satan! It was all red and black and had lightning coming out of it. I guess when you are 6 that's what it looks like to you - what could be worse?! She said you had never heard screams so loud or a car turn around so quickly. In retrospect she's bummed she didn't get a photo of it, but I assured her they were in survival mode. Nobody would stop to do that with their children in the car - I know I wouldn't and I watch every tornado show I can and love to see the footage! That tornado never made it to the news that I'm aware of and it took out a couple homes and killed a person.

I spent the weekend glued to the TV, facebook, and email catching glimpses of what my friends and community was going through. I love weather news, and I will freely admit I was totally addicted the entire weekend. You probably saw Mike's facebook status of the TV screen because that was all that was on.

Water conservation are the order of the day for us right now. Clean up is the biggest deal for most people. It will be a months-long process. The Opryland Hotel will be closed for at least 6 months for example. The damage is already over 1.5 billion. Most people did not have flood insurance because they did not live anywhere near a river or were denied getting it if they tried. It's awful. But from another perspective, people are demonstrating why Tennessee is called the Volunteer State and are already pitching in and getting the clean up started. As soon as school is out, I want to get out there with the kids and help people who lost everything rebuild. There will be lots of opportunities to volunteer in the months ahead.