Tennessee is a state with lots of lakes and rivers. It also gets lots of rain at times. Six inches of rain overnight is not an unusual occurrence. And it has to go somewhere, and there is always downstream. Because much of the state is quite hilly to kind of mountainous, the rain can runoff very rapidly.
Brings to mind the old song written about the 1927 flood of the Mississippi River. That year the water was fifty-six feet about flood level on the Cumberland River at Nashville. One hundred and forty-five levees were washed out by the flood waters and the resulting damage flooded 27,000 square miles and displaced 700,000 people from their homes. 14% of Arkansas was under water and the Mississippi was 80 miles wide at Memphis. On Good Friday, 1927 New Orleans received 15 inches of rain. The Mighty Mississippi can be an uncontrollable monster at times.
Herbert Hoover was the Secretary of Commerce under Calvin Coolidge, and his leadership in resolving the issues from this devastating flood was instrumental in him being elected President of the United States in 1928.
Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy penned the blues song about the experience in 1929 and named it “When the Levee Breaks.” It was about a man who lost his home and family when the levee broke. You may not remember that version, but Led Zeppelin recorded the song in 1971 on their fourth album.
Since I have been living in Tennessee I have witnessed a number of flood events. The first was the flood in Waverly, Tennessee. Waverly was about twenty-five miles east of us. We had a friend who lived there so we were a little familiar with the area. They received 17 inches of rain after midnight and by 10am the levee washed out and sent a tsunami like wave into town flooding it out within five minutes. Nineteen people lost their lives in the disaster.
Clarkesville, just twenty-five miles northeast of us has had two floods in the last six months when the Cumberland River over flowed its banks from seven inches of rain overnight. I watched news reports as the Buffalo Trace Distillery office in Kentucky slid into the river as the bank washed away in the flood.
This last month the city of Rives, a town of 300 just seventy miles west of us on the Obion River, was obliterated when the levee broke after seven inches of rain over night. All 105 homes were flooded and everyone was evacuated just before the levee was breached for fear that they would be washed away.
Of course, everyone in the country watched as Johnson City, Tennessee was washed away from the once in a thousand-year flood from Hurricane Helene last fall.
I drove across the Cumberland River last month during the weekend of the heavy rains and saw that the boat launch was completely under water. The dock was forty feet from the bank, with the approach completely submerged. People couldn’t get to the marina where their boats were berthed because of the high water. Our neighbors who live on the Tennessee River watched as their dock floated up so high it came off the bolsters and floated out into the bay. We live on Kentucky Lake and are upstream from the Kentucky Dam, which was completed in 1944 and is the largest east of the Mississippi. It is 8,422 feet wide and creates Kentucky Lake which is one of the largest artificial lakes in the United States, encompassing 160,000 acres and stretching for 184 miles. It is a hydroelectric plant which uses 1 million gallons per second and increased the discharge to over 2 million gallons per second during the February floods.
All this makes the Led Zeppelin song seem more sinister than it did when I listened to it as a kid. But the natives simply take it in stride and deal with it. I am just glad we live on high ground.
