Ten dead after catastrophic flooding devastates Tennessee
Entire homes have been washed away, with cars swept away and battered by the record-breaking floods.
At least ten people are dead and dozens are missing after catastrophic flooding in Middle Tennessee.
Locals said the record-breaking rainfall was the third ‘hundred year flood’ in a decade – but branded this ‘ten times worse’.
Homes and rural roads were washed away on Saturday, officials explained, as one local spoke of complete devastation and seeing a dead baby.
The McEwen and Waverly areas, in Humphreys County, were battered particularly hard by the flash flooding, with two of the victims being toddlers.
Waverly business owner Kansas Klein said he watched in horror from a bridge on Saturday morning as cars and entire houses were swept down the road – while astonishing video footage showed cars strewn across the area, with many on their rooves.
He saw two girls holding on to a puppy sweep past clinging to a wooden board – far too fast for him and other onlookers to help – and is not sure what happened to them.
After returning, Mr Klein said: ‘I’m looking at my restaurant, thinking how horrible it was that I lost my restaurant and then I walk around the corner and see someone’s baby dead — my restaurant doesn’t mean a whole lot right now.
‘It was devastating: buildings were knocked down, half of them were destroyed.
‘People were pulling out bodies of people who had drowned and didn’t make it out.’
Low-income homes in block buildings known as Brookside in the city of about 4,500 people appeared to have taken the brunt of the flooding, Mr Klein added.
The 48-year-old, who has called the area west of Nashville home for more than half his life, continued: ‘This is the third 100-hundred year flood that we’ve had in about 10 years,’ referencing similar events in 2010 and 2019.
‘But this is 100 times worse than either one of them was. … The last report I saw was there were 31 missing. This is a small town so the odds are I know most of those people.’
Mr Klein, who is not sure what the future holds for the area or his family and New York style pizzeria now was shocked at how quickly the water came and went – having been allowed to return just a couple of hours after the devastation unfolded.
A morning deluge of between 10 and 12 inches of rain in Humphreys County had caused floodwaters to reach 7 feet inside his restaurant.
Humphreys County Sheriff Chris Davis told news outlets more than 30 people had been reported missing but it was not immediately clear how many had lived at Brookside.
Four shelters were set up on Saturday night for residents whose homes had flooded, but rescue efforts were complicated by phone lines being knocked out.
In nearby McEwen, a high school was being used to reunite families.
Resident Michael Pate said: ‘There were people inside homes asleep and woke up to their house moving, like it was going down the creek.’
Two of the bodies recovered were toddlers who had been swept away from their father, Mr Davis told WSMV-TV.
Waverly couple Cindy Dunn, 48, and her husband Jimmy, 49, were rescued from their attic by a crew who used a bulldozer to reach them.
‘Hell. That’s what we had to go through,’ Mrs Dunn told The Tennessean.
She said her husband woke her up on Saturday, explaining that floodwaters had pushed her car to their backyard.
Eventually the water in their house rose to at least 6 feet (1.8 meters) high, forcing them to the attic.
‘My husband is dealing with cancer. He’s going through chemotherapy. And I am an amputee. So there was no going anywhere besides the attic’, Mrs Dunn said.
She added that their home and neighbouring houses ‘are gone.’
McEwen was pummeled with about 17 inches of rain in less than a day, smashing the state’s previous record of 13.6 inches, which has stood since 1982, according to the National Weather Service Nashville.
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The service said no additional rainfall was expected on Sunday but flood warnings remain in effect until Monday morning for Duck River near Hurricane Mills in Humphreys County and Piney River near Vernon in Hickman County.
The Tennessee Emergency Management Agency branded the situation ‘dangerous and evolving’ and urged people to avoid travel in the affected counties.
It is not clear if the floods has been made worse by climate change, but the incident comes in the wake of various extreme weather events in the USA and across the world.
Just last week, a landmark report on the environmental crisis warned that flooding will worsen as a result of global warming.
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