A car is also included in the rubble that washed up atop a bridge over a stream on Sunday, August 22, 2021 in Waverly, Tenn.
At least 22 people were killed and rescue teams searched hard among broken homes on Sunday and floodwaters pounded through Middle Tennessee amid rubble for dozens of people who were still missing after record-breaking rain.
Saturday’s floods in rural areas shut down roads, cellphone towers and telephone lines, leaving families unsure whether their loved ones survived the unprecedented deluge. Emergency workers were conducting a door-to-door search, said Christy Brown, coordinator of the Humphries County Schools Health and Safety Supervisor.
Humphries County Sheriff Chris Davis said many of the missing people live in neighborhoods where the waters rose the most, which confirmed 22 deaths in his county. The names of the missing were on a board at the county emergency center and listed on a city department’s Facebook page.
“I would expect that given the death toll, we’re going to see mostly recovery efforts at this point rather than rescue efforts,” said Patrick Sheehan, Tennessee’s director of emergency management.
According to surviving family members, the dead included twins who were swept away by their father’s arms, and a foreman at the farm of county music star Loretta Lynn. The sheriff of the county of about 18,000 people, about 60 miles (96 kilometers) west of Nashville, said he had lost a best friend.
Humphries County received 17 inches (43 centimeters) of rain in less than 24 hours on Saturday, the National Weather Service said, breaking the Tennessee record for a day’s rain by more than 3 inches (8 centimeters).
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee visited the area, calling it “a devastating picture of loss and heartache”. He stopped on Main Street in Waverly where foundations of some houses were washed away and people were flushing their waterlogged property. There was debris from wrecked cars, demolished businesses and homes around the county and inside was a chaotic, tangled mix of things.
Shirley Foster cried as the governor left. She said she had just learned that a friend from her church had died.
“I thought I was over with the shock of it all. I’m just bored with my friend. My house is nothing but my friend is gone,” Foster told the governor.
Meteorologists said the region of Middle Tennessee among the worst-affected saw twice as much rain as the previous worst-case scenario for flooding. Hurricane lines moved over the area for hours, releasing record amounts of moisture – a scenario scientists have warned could become more common due to global warming.
Torrential rain swiftly turned the creeks running behind the backyards and into furious rapids through the town of Waverly. Business owner Klein, a Kansas city of 4,500 people, stood on a bridge Saturday and saw two girls holding a puppy and clinging to a wooden board sweep past, the current was so strong that no one could catch them Was. They didn’t know what happened to them.
Not far from the bridge, Klein told The Associated Press by phone that dozens of buildings in the low-income housing area known as Brookside bore the brunt of the flash floods from Trent Creek.
“It was devastating: buildings were torn down, half of them destroyed,” Klein said. “People were taking out bodies of people who had drowned and did not come out.”
The Humphries County Sheriff’s Office Facebook page is full of people searching for missing friends and family. GoFundMe pages were created to ask for help with funeral expenses for the dead, in which 7-month-old twins were shaken by their father’s arms as they tried to escape.
The foreman, Wayne Spears, was also killed at Lynn’s farm.
“He’s in his barn and next thing you know, he goes from checking the animals in the barn to hanging out in the barn to watching people swim in the creek. And how fast did it come up,” Sheriff said.
A photo taken by someone in the field shows Spears in a shepherd’s hat clinging to a brown pole, churning water up to his chest.
“Wayne is one of those people, he does everything for everyone, if there’s a job to be done,” said his friend Michael Pate, who met Spears on the farm 15 years ago.
At the Cash Saver Grocery in Waverly, workers stood at desks, registers and a flower rack, as the water from the creek usually flows 400 feet (120 m), after ravaging the low-income housing next door. reached up. At one point, he tried to break through the sailing in the attic and couldn’t, co-owner David Hensley said.
As the situation worsened, the flood waters stopped rising rapidly and a rescue boat arrived. “We told him if there’s anyone else you can get by, go get them, we think we’re fine,” Hensley said.
At the start of a news conference on the impact of Tropical Storm Henry on New England, President Joe Biden offered condolences to the people of Tennessee and directed federal disaster officials to speak with the governor and offer assistance.
According to the National Weather Service in Nashville, the city of McEwen, just east of Waverly, received 17.02 inches (43.2 centimeters) of rain on Saturday, breaking the state’s 24-hour record of 13.6 inches (34.5 centimeters) since 1982. However, Saturday’s numbers will have to be confirmed.
A flash flood watch was issued for the area before the rain began, with forecasters saying 4 to 6 inches (10 to 15 cm) of rain was possible. Chrissy Hurley, a Weather Service meteorologist in Nashville, said only 9 inches (23 centimeters) of rain fell in the worst storm ever recorded in this region of central Tennessee.
“Predicting almost a record is something we don’t do very often,” Hurley said. “The doubled amount we’ve ever seen was almost immeasurable.”
Recent scientific research has determined that extreme rain events will be more frequent due to man-made climate change. Hurley said it is impossible to know its exact role in Saturday’s floods, but over the past year his office has dealt with floods that occurred just south of Nashville in September and about once every 100 years in March near the city. was expected.
“We had an incredible amount of water in the atmosphere,” Hurley said of Saturday’s floods. “The storm developed and moved over the same area over and over again.”
The problem is not limited to Tennessee. A federal study found that man-made climate change more than doubled the likelihood of a heavy rainfall of 26 inches (66 centimeters) around Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in August 2016. At least 13 people died in those floods and 150,000 homes were damaged.
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