Last May's flood dealt a cruel blow to much of the city, but Mother Nature reserved a particularly mean-spirited form of punishment for a few neighborhoods along the Cumberland, including a small section of Inglewood just north of Shelby Park. At midday Sunday, May 2, as TV news cameras broadcast images of Bellevue subdivisions devastated by the previous night's torrential rains, folks from this modest working-class neighborhood had so far been spared the flood's wrath, and felt like they'd dodged a mortar shell.
But on Sunday afternoon, the Army Corp of Engineers decided they had to open dams upstream from Nashville to prevent even greater catastrophe. With no warning, floodwaters were soon rising rapidly along the banks of the Cumberland, submerging to varying degrees a couple dozen mostly brick ranches and duplexes just across the river from the Opryland Hotel, which was experiencing its own delayed disaster.
By Monday afternoon, the intersection of McGinnis and Morganmeade was a surreal sight. As the hot sun glared down from a cloudless sky, residents were gathered on McGinnis about 30 yards uphill from the crossroad, looking down on the lake that just yesterday, even after the rain had stopped, had been their neighborhood. Some were silently forlorn, others outwardly grief-stricken, as they consoled each other and watched volunteers in canoes rescuing still more folks and possessions.
Barbara Carr, who'd lived on the northeast corner of the intersection for more than a dozen years, gazed down at her home with a look of quiet resignation. The river water had crept up to the bottom of her first-floor windows, and it still hadn't stopped rising.
"When I left yesterday, it hadn't gotten inside my house," she said that day. "It had just flooded my yard. It hadn't gotten near as high as it is now. My car is submerged. It's gone. Inside, I don't know what's going on right now."
The Scene caught up with Carr recently to find out how she fared after the water receded. "When I finally got back into the house, it was a mess," she says. "Mud everywhere. Water was about three feet up my walls on the first floor. We lost a lot of valuable items, pictures, clothes, anything that was low, close to the floor." The hardest part, she said, was losing irreplaceable family photographs.
But in one important way, she was luckier than many Nashvillians. "I was blessed to have flood insurance," she says, "and they handled it pretty good. It was State Farm. I was pretty pleased."
Carr and her mother went to live with Carr's daughter until her house was livable again, and on Sept. 1, she moved back in. Not surprisingly, her completely submerged Toyota Corolla was beyond repair, but that was insured too, and she's now driving a Nissan Sentra. She says most of her neighbors are back now, including her next-door neighbors on McGinnis, who just returned a couple weeks ago. But one house, right next to the Shelby Park entrance, is still boarded up, and Carr says she's heard that the people who lived there aren't coming back.
So has life returned to normal? "I think as normal as to be expected right now," says Carr, a supervisor in the housekeeping department at Vanderbilt, where she's worked for 21 years. "There's still some little things in the house that I've got to do. But other than that, everything is good. It's good to be back in the neighborhood."
As she recalls her experiences, Carr exudes the optimism of a glass-half-full sort of person, even when the river is way too full. She has no desire to leave the area, and she's not losing sleep about future flooding. "I think we're all going to be a little bit nervous, especially when we get those huge downpours," she says. "But as far as being frightened out of my mind, no, I'm not at that point."
And if this truly was a thousand-year flood, so be it. "In a thousand years, I know I won't be here any longer," Carr says. "But going through that once is enough."
