Videos from the Flood

As promised, here are a few videos of the flooding here in Kingston Springs. The first one is from Saturday, May 1, 2010 and shows the bridge at the bottom of our road. The river is already extremely high, but the bridge is traversable and you can see that the old trestle and railroad bridges are still intact:



This one shows the water overflowing the bridge on Sunday, May 2. Note that the left side of the old trestle bridge has been wiped out completely. The violence of the raging river is awe inspiring. No wonder the road was ripped apart:



Finally, the most horrifying video of all: a big beautiful house on East Kingston Springs Road being picked up off its foundations and floating away. This one is painful for me to watch, but it really captures the unprecedented destruction of this storm:



Now playing: Bob Dylan,"High Water (for Charley Patton)."

Flood Damage

DSC_8456, originally uploaded by Rodger Coleman.

None of the photographs I took yesterday really capture the devastation of the flood waters. I was pretty much totally freaked out when I saw for myself what nature hath wrought. This is the our road at the bottom of the hill, just before it crosses the Harpeth River. The water lifted up pieces of asphalt and tossed them around like children's toys. They eventually closed the bridge to pedestrians and it will be a long, long time before the road opens again. There are more photos on my Flickr photostream, if you're interested. There's lots of video footage on YouTube which I will post tomorrow. We are lucky to live at the top of the hill and our house suffered no water damage whatsoever. But many people were not so fortunate. Six (6!) houses in Kingston Springs were lifted off their foundations and floated away. Just incredible. My prayers are with all my neighbors who were hardest hit by this 500-year flood. Let's hope it's another 500 years before anything like this happens again