A Flood Story

     I made a new friend last week.  She's one of the many people who live near me here in Bellevue that suffered massive damage to her home when the Harpeth River flooded on Sunday, May 2nd. She and her husband bought their first home in one of the newer subdivisions that is connected to Boone Trace, the neighborhood where Joel and I bought our first home. While I was doing what I could to help her salvage her Christmas Village collection, we found out that we have a lot in common, most notably that we are both married to attorneys who are crazy marathon runners (although her husband is deployed in Iraq right now which means that she is dealing with this clean-up effort without him here). The main divide between us seems to be that she lives in a place in Bellevue where the Harpeth River flooded her house and I live in a place where I watched all the flooding happen.  My story of surviving the flood is laughable compared to hers.  I endured it, she survived it.

   If you read my blog post from May 5th you may remember that between noon and 2pm on Sunday, May 2nd,  Joel and I realized that we were marooned in our neighborhood.  At about that same time, my new friend realized that she and her dogs were trapped on the second floor of her house with no way out.  She yelled for help for 15 or 20 minutes before she heard a man call back to her.  He told her to keep yelling because he was coming to get her. He swam to her house from two streets away.  He was wearing a life jacket and brought an extra one with him for her to wear.  The only way out of her house was from her second story window. She had to jump out into the swirling murky water of the Harpeth River and she had to leave everything behind, including her three dogs, because she was swimming out of her home. She said that swimming in the river and the pouring down rain wasn't too bad as long as they stayed in between two houses, but once they got away from the houses, out where the streets used to be, the current was incredibly strong and you just had to go with it as you made your way across or it would take you under.   When she finally made it to dry ground she stayed on the bank of the rising river repeatedly asking for someone to please please rescue her dogs.  After about an hour of waiting she saw a boat coming towards her with one of her sweet dogs standing in the front, his ears flapping in the wind.  When she was reunited with her dogs she said they started walking up the hill but they didn't really have any place to go, they were just walking up and away from the floodwaters. Her house was flooded and she didn't have her cell phone or her car or anything and even if she'd had those things, there was no way out of her neighborhood.  At some point she saw a man and woman standing outside their home watching all that was going on and she walked up to them and told them she needed some help.They took her and her dogs in for the night. I met them while I was there last week. They had walked down the hill from their house to see how she was doing.

       By the time I showed up to offer some help on Thursday afternoon, a tremendous amount of work had already been done deconstructing her house.  Water logged  floors and walls and doors and cabinets and furniture had been ripped out or removed and were piled in her front yard.  I spent some time bleaching door knobs and light switch covers and socket covers because an effort was being made to save anything that could be saved so that it can be put back into the house. Flood damage is expensive. Over the course of the afternoon I heard her say that her grandmother's rocker and a silver engraved frame that had her wedding photo in it were missing and she assumed that they had been washed away when the river flowed through her house.  She had found her great-grandmother's silver, although it was already rusting from being submerged in river water.  A few of us took it from her and went to work wiping the rust stains off and drying it out.  One or two pieces may be permanently damaged but we all agreed that she should keep those and maybe someday she could use them to tell her grandchildren about the The Great Flood of 2010.

Saving the Silver

    It was humbling to be there and see the amount of damage caused by the normally tame Harpeth River.  The Red Cross was there handing out supplies and neighbors were continually bringing food and water and making themselves useful wherever they could.  I heard many people say that those of us who live in Bellevue whose homes were spared are very lucky and I know that we are, but when such a large portion of your community is flooded it's hard to really feel lucky.  It's hard to just "feel" anything - I've got to do something and because I live right here, right in the middle of this natural disaster I have the opportunity to get out there and roll my sleeves up and get to work.  My challenge is to keep finding ways to do that.  What I would like to encourage you to do if you are reading this and don't live in the Nashville area is donate to the Red Cross or some other organization providing flood relief.  If you haven't heard much about this flood, go to youtube.com and watch one of the many videos that have been posted about it.  The local media is reporting that this is one of the worst natural disasters to ever hit our country. The damage numbers that are being reported are massive - $1.5 billion and climbing - too massive for me to get my head around. I still don't know how this isn't national news, how this isn't a bigger story, but it isn't and at this point it probably never will be.  So, I'm doing what I can and I'm telling you and anyone else who may happen to read this one family's flood story - one story out of thousands.