EMERGENCY PREPAREDNESS
Andrea Silva, a Beech High School graduate, and Jamey Howell, a soon-to-be Beech High School graduate, clung to Howell's Jeep in May 2010 as flood waters overtook the vehicle at the intersection of Saundersville Road and Lower Station Camp Creek.
A 1,000-year flood? Don't count on it Editor’s note: The following column originally ran in a March 2011 edition of the Gallatin News Examiner and has since been slightly edited: At 7:20 a.m. Monday, Feb. 28, I stepped out the front door of our house to drive my son to school. The first thing we noticed was a smattering of raindrops hitting the front steps, the point at which you can still make out the individual droplets on the cement. Over the next 10 minutes, the pace of the rain picked up, and that’s how it stayed for the next four hours or so. On my drive to work, from Hendersonville to Gallatin, I gingerly drove through spots of pooling water on streets and roads. On either side of Vietnam Vets were rushing streams of brown water where normally streams don’t
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exist, and small bodies of water forming in fields. All this rain can make anyone nervous. “Our climate prediction center can do long-range seasonal forecasts, but we have found that spring is not very predictable,” said Larry Vannozzi, meteorologist in charge for the National Weather Service’s Nashville office and a Hendersonville resident. After what happened in early May 2010, when two days and about 10-12
inches of steady rain brought major flooding to Sumner County, any sort of sustained rain can cause anxiety. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers categorized the May 2010 event as a 1,000-year flood. Then in August 2010 – just three months later – another heavy rain in a short period of time caused a second wave of flooding, not as serious as the first but bad enough to disrupt our daily flow of life. Some experts called that second flooding a 100year event. “What are the chances of two such
events happening in the same year?” Gallatin City Engineer Nick Tuttle said. “What happened last May has changed our state of mind such that now we see this kind of flooding as a possibility where before it wasn’t even on people’s minds.” Between Thursday, Feb. 24 (two to three inches) and Monday, Feb. 28 (one to three), we were hit with two sustained rains and a shorter one in between that in tandem sent creeks and rivers rising, although not to flood level. My guess is, we are not necessarily safe for the next 999 or even 99 years. My very-amateur theory is that the May 2010 flood event has left us more susceptible to a similar disaster, if not this year than in the next five to 10 years. Consider this: it