Wow – hard to believe that 10 years have passed since the 2010 Nashville flood. I believe Monday was the exact date, 10 years later, of the rain coming in. Probably could very easily just look that up, but you guys know my style by now. Guesstimates are good enough for the purposes of what we do here at SoBros Network.
I remember it well, though. It’s one of a handful of events that those of us born in Nashville in the late 80s will never forget. I remember being a kid during the tornado of 1998, being in college for the tornado in 2006, and of course, this year’s tornado. I remember the bad ice storm we got back in the 1990s – sliding around in the passenger seat of my dad’s truck in the Donelson K-Mart parking lot. And, then there’s the flood of 2010, chief among them.
At the time, I was working my first job out of college – making leather journals and selling them on line. Yep. That’s real. I was pretty aimless, though. I was working out of my boss’ house over in the Hermitage area. Just tired of school and not wanting to go further into debt to become a sports psychologist or a guidance counselor, I took my chances with the first full-time job I could get. But, not having real ambition and being burnt out all the time led me to slack a bit. There was one Saturday morning I had to go into the “office” because I had slacked off so much during the week that the orders had backed up on me and I was going in to try and avoid a catastrophic Monday.
I was taking a break with some coffee, outside on the front porch that morning, when it hit me – “man, it’s not going to stop raining…“
But, y’know – you don’t really think about it. You don’t see the “2010 Nashville flood” headlines coming. I had no idea how long it’d really been raining because I wasn’t paying attention. At the time, I was still living out at home with my folks in Gladeville. I put in my full eight hours on a Saturday, and hopped in the car to head home. The game plan was to scoop up some Cori’s Doghouse in Providence and go home to do absolutely nothing.
In my periphery, I kinda noticed that the water had started to pool along the road out by the office in Hermitage. I made it to Providence, still not really realizing what was going on around me. By the time I made it out to Gladeville, I realized how serious the situation was. I grew up off a small country road – there were only two ways in and out. That Saturday, I realized both were flooded. I couldn’t get back home. My parents couldn’t get out. I remember thinking, “damn, this is a pretty bad rainstorm…”
I had no idea.
This whole time, the rain was unrelenting. It just wouldn’t stop. I ended up crashing on a friend’s couch for a couple of days before the water had subsided enough for me to get home. My room out there was a converted garage, and had four inches of water sitting in it at one point, according to my mom. Considering my bed was just a stack of mattresses on the floor, that was bad news.
But, for as bad as we thought it was, turning on the news, and seeing those 2010 Nashville flood headlines roll in made us realize how fortunate we were. I couldn’t believe the way the flood had taken the city. Longtime friend of the SoBros Network, Mack, picked me up one day, and we went driving around the area to scout the damage for ourselves. You’ll see all the photos of downtown online when everyone talks about this flood, but you rarely see how it effected the towns outside of Nashville. You couldn’t even drive across Briley Parkway. The Opry Mills parking lot may as well have been a lake.
Mack picked myself and Brandon up a couple of days after the flood waters started to subside. We went to volunteer out west of town in Pegram. Punching out drywall, sweeping and cleaning houses, doing some heavy grunt work (that’s what Brandon and I are doing in the featured image, showing my sick plumber’s crack). I’m 6’2″ – walking into some houses and seeing water lines on the wall that were above my head, where the flood had come in and completely filled living rooms, absolutely floored me. It was a very harrowing experience.
Mack had been out to Pegram for the previous couple of days, too. He made it out there when the water was still sitting in backyards. He described to us that his first day out there, they had to clean up dead animals all over the neighborhood. The river had risen and carried turtles and fish and such into the neighborhood, but when it subsided, instead of floating back out to the river, some animals got caught in fences in people’s backyards.
Being out there….seeing the damage reported in real time….my feelings went from amazement to heartbreak pretty quickly. You saw people who had lost it all just trying to figure out what to do next.
Brandon and I did what we could to help, considering (and I don’t think Brandon will be mad at me for saying this) we’re not handymen. We don’t really specialize in anything. But, I’ll never forget seeing the damage. It’s the same kind of sobering crestfallen feeling that I got in the clean-up efforts over by DCA just a couple of months ago.
The 2010 Nashville flood hung with us for months after it happened. It’s still something that brings back vivid doleful memories 10 years later.
Stoney Keeley is the Editor in Chief of The SoBros Network. He is a strong supporter of Team GSD and #BeBetter. “Big Natural” covers the Tennessee Titans, Nashville, and a whole wealth of nonsense. Follow on Twitter @StoneyKeeley
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