Football & Fairy Tales The McSwains: The Great Flood

A little over 2 weeks ago, Nashville had a historic flood. I've been wanting to blog about it for the past 2 weeks but the thought of trying to capture everything that happened in words & pictures is almost too overwhelming. I have been somewhat paralyzed about it but finally decided after this weekend that I needed to just sit down and do my best. So let me start from the beginning.

It started raining on Saturday morning. I went out to Target that day to pick up a few things and remember having to run into the store through what felt like a torrential downpour! Little did I know then what was coming! After CPA cancelled the prom due to the weather, we decided to take dinner over to the Morrows. We picked up some pizza and headed over there for a fun dinner with all of the kids. It is so much fun seeing Madison Claire around the Morrow kids!! That night, once we came home, the weather got much worse. There were some tornado warnings in the area so we had to get Madison Claire out of bed and go seek shelter in our basement cubby from about 10:45 - 11:15pm. She was really out of it, so pretty much drifted in and out the entire time we were down stairs.

Some areas of Nashville started having some flooding on Saturday night, so church was cancelled on Sunday morning. We stayed in all day and it kept raining, and raining, and raining, and raining. It rained all day Sunday and kept raining through Monday. I still can't believe that it rained enough over those few days to cause all of the horrible devastation. All of the rivers rose above flood level - including the Harpeth River & Cumberland River. Here are some pictures from the flooding:

This is about two miles from our house, on the main road West End Avenue. We take this route and turn at this red-light every week to go to Pei Wei & Whole Foods.

This is a neighborhood where we know several families.

An aerial view of downtown Nashville

Check out this house!

This is a shopping center in Franklin

This is Interstate 40 - Annie got stuck on I-40 coming home from Hendersonville. She and her mom had to spend the night in Dixson because the interstate was closed. Luckily they found a friend of a friend who lived there so they were able to stay at her place. So scary!

This is where Ryan went to high school - DCA. It had 5-6 feet of water in the high school.

DCA's football field - there was 16 - 18 feet of water on the field. Here are the top of the goal posts.

Downtown Nashville

Bellevue area

The Grand Ole Opry House. Opryland hotel had 8-10 feet of water in the hotel and Oprymills Mall had water up to the roof line.

Railroad tracks...what a beautiful picture

This is I-24 at Bell Road. I used to live off of this exit when I first graduated from Vandy. This was a shot from TV...and was one of the first areas to flood. So crazy.

We were so fortunate throughout the actual flooding. We didn't have any real side effects other than being stuck inside for 3 days. We know friends and families through church and CPA that had to be evacuated from their homes. Some lost their basement level, some their first floor, and some their entire homes. It has been amazing to see how the Nashville community has come together to help those in need. CPA didn't have school on Monday or Tuesday the week of the flood and they went out in droves to help with clean up. Ryan went with Nate and the CPA Baseball team to help clean out the home of a single mom from CPA who has a child in the 6th grade. I wasn't able to get away from work during the day, but Anne and I went during the lunch hour and were able to help for an hour or so. We essentially gutted the home - tearing down drywall, pulling up carpet, hardwood floors, the subfloor, etc. All of the trash was piled in the yard towards the street.

As the days have passed, the trash has piled up even more. It is truly unbelievable. Yesterday, I was driving down a road about a mile from my house and I was just overcome with emotion. Here are some pictures from that stretch:

Here is a short little video driving down that stretch of road:

On Saturday, Ryan and I volunteered with our church to help with flood relief. We met at Cross Pointe Church in Bellevue and headed out to Beech Bend Road in Bellevue. When we first got there, they told us that our original "site leader" had been working in the area that week and wasn't able to be there on Saturday because he had contracted a lung fungus! NOT what we wanted to hear going into the day!!! Needless to say, I grabbed a mask quickly and Ryan wore TWO masks! It was so hot with just the one mask so I can't imagine what it was like with two! It was so great to serve with our church community. Our good friends from our small group, Shawn & Audra Tilden were there serving and it was SO much more fun (for me at least!) to have them there.

We got to work on one house first tearing down a shed and pulling off all of the siding on the house. Audra and I cleaned up trash in the front of the yard and then got to work pulling off the siding. My forearms are SO sore today! I was so proud of us though...there were many moments where I thought to myself "I can't believe I'm doing this". The first one that comes to mind is when we were pulling down siding and out pours a million maggots. Seriously...it was DISGUSTING! The maggots were followed by termites and even a snake came out of one house! Not to mention - it smelled HORRIBLE! You can imagine the amount of mold that was there after 2 weeks of having everything in the house & on the house wet. We kept going though, because we weren't doing it for ourselves but to help the homeowner.

Ryan and Shawn did all of the crazy heavy lifting - using their strength to knock things down and get all of their pent up aggression out! Our pastor, Brian, took some pictures so once I get them from him I'll post them. We ended up working on 3 different homes, basically trying to get them down to the frame. We drove back out there last night to take pictures of the homes we worked on. Here they are:

Here is what we looked like after the day of work (note - Ryan made me put on my gloves and mask because he said without them I looked like I had just come from workout class....I promise though, I was really nasty if you could see me up close!).