Monday, May 3, 2010

A serious note on Nashville flooding

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Bellevue - @andreakleid
Photo from Flickr.


It's weird when you watch CBS Nightly News and see your beloved hometown that rarely makes national headlines on the Breaking News segment. I'd heard that rain had been pounding Nashville all weekend, but I had no idea so much flooding was even possible. To see places I know and frequent(ed) completely underwater is absolutely unreal. The Cumberland River, which runs right beside downtown Nashville, has flooded up to a 50 ft water level and completely submerged riverside streets and parks and flooded downtown buildings. More than 11,000 residents are without power. Interstates are completely closed. Neighborhoods are completely submerged. Thousands of people are displaced or left homeless. And 11 people have died.

This video is of I-24. It's an interstate, completely underwater and with a building floating down it.



Despite the mention on last night's CBS Nightly News and a feature on CNN's homepage, the rest of the media world doesn't seem to find this important enough for major coverage. But luckily, we have social media to illustrate just how serious this is and how many people it has affected. To see more pictures of the damage, you can check out here and here. For updates on flood damage, you can check out a great blog called Nashvillest or our newspaper's website, The Tennessean. And to help out, you can always donate to the Red Cross Middle Tennessee Chapter or the Metro Nashville Disaster Relief Fund, or if you're in the Middle Tennessee area, volunteer with Hands on Nashville.


Music Always - @prodigaljohn
Photo from Flickr.

2 comments:

Boardinginmyforties said...

Wow, this is incredible and not in a good way. It is sad how filtered the news ends up being with minor stories becoming major ones and ones like this not getting the attention they deserve...terrible!

Kari said...

The NYTimes has pushed it to their homepage...about damn time!

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/04/us/04flood.html

And apparently it's not 11,000 people without power...it's 45,000.