Hey guys,
I live in Clarksville Tennessee, along with Nashville and a few other places, we were hit pretty bad by the flooding. I can't speak much for the situation in Nashville, but I can speak of what happened here (maybe 40 minutes north of Nashville) from my limited perspective.
As a background, I live approximately 5 miles from the Cumberland river, which is what the city of Clarksville was originally built on. I commute daily to a university about a quarter mile away from the river. It, along with most of old downtown Clarksville, is situated on a plateau that rises perhaps 20-30 feet a few hundred meters from the actual river so they did not experience flooding directly. However, most of the smaller businesses lining the river (gas stations, pawn shops, etc) and low lying spots a significant distance away from the river were all swamped.
The flooding occurred during finals week at the university, and classes were canceled for two days. There are three main routes to the river / old downtown clarksville / the university, and two of which were closed completely.
The route I generally drive takes me over a bridge that spans a small offshoot of the Cumberland river. The water on a typical day is ~20-30 feet under the bridge, but a day after the rain the water was over the bridge and flooding businesses on the other side under several feet of water.
Because of the distance I live from the river, my house and immediate neighborhood was not significantly affected by the water, but there were several neighborhoods directly flooded (both poor and wealthier) and areas where power was down for a significant period of time.
When the flood warnings came I didn't really think much of it. We always get flood warnings during bad thunderstorms, but in the 8 years I've lived here we've never had flooding that I can recall.
The last day when it kept raining it really sank in for me that it was pretty serious. Because the school was closed I stayed off the roads near the river, but I did see user submitted pictures of the flood on our local news website, and recognized quite a few places that were under a serious amount of water.
So... at this point it started hitting me. With the wastewater treatment plant potentially underwater, and the storm sewers being overwhelmed, would the water be safe to drink and if so, how long? How long will the power be on?
There's a dam that feeds the region called wolf creek, and I remember hearing about it a long time ago and how it could put us under several feet of water by itself should it fail... it must be really stressed if we're experiencing record levels of flooding here. Would it hold out?
There was also a lot of RUMINT going around based on various texts with friends. Conflicting reports on which roads were closed, was the interstate closed, etc.
As it turns out, the waste water treatment plant was still ok, and the water probably was safe to drink although as a precaution I didn't drink it, but planned on treating / boiling it if it came down to having to use it until I heard definitively one way or the other. The local news did mention that they had to dump raw sewage into the river though and that they had no other choice (just caught a minute of that though so I didn't catch the whole story).
I had my general preps though I didn't need any of it. Household wise though, I don't own a generator and my parents use CPAP machines to breathe at night. A friend of mine lost power for days, and had that happen here it could have been pretty serious so I need to rectify that (just a matter of money though).
I have a verizon mifi which I didn't end up needing but it was nice to have an alternate way to access the internet in case the internet or power went out in my home. A scanner would have been nice too.
I was off work for most of the flooding because I had requested the time off so I could study for Finals, so I can't say how bad the rush was at walmart due to the flooding. I do remember most of the bottled water was gone though, and your general panic buying seemed to have occurred, though I don't think it was as bad as when Kentucky had their ice storm.
Overall thankfully we didn't lose many people, but there was millions worth of damage. We lost one of the largest job providers in the city, a regional call center for AT&T (convergies). Additionally the area is prone to sinkholes anyway, and I have a bad feeling that with water reaching places it never has in recent history we'll see some new sinkholes opening up in the future.
Sorry about how long winded that was, I'm pretty tired tonight!
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