"At least" and "more than" are scary words if you have kith or kin in Tennessee. As of Sunday afternoon, "at least 22 people" were dead and "more than 50 people" were missing in the floodwaters that no one had ever foreseen in middle Tennessee. In rural areas, the flooding took out cell phone towers and telephone lines and made roads impassable. No one outside the area knew who had lived or died. Rescue workers were going door to door to find survivors.
On Saturday, a creek running through Waverly, TN rose so fast that grocery store employees downstream from a devastated area of town climbed on desks and counters and tried unsuccessfully to break the ceiling so they could retreat into the attic. Mercifully, the water began to subside before they were swept away.
Parts of the area took 17 inches of rain in 24 hours, breaking the previous rainfall record by three inches. The deluge was double meteorologists' previous estimates of the maximum flooding possible in that area of the state.
"We had an incredible amount of water in the atmosphere," Hurley said of Saturday's flooding. "Thunderstorms developed and moved across the same area over and over and over."
Nowadays, such destructive, unheard-of weather is happening far more often.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tennessee-flood-death-toll-missing/
Photo: "Heavy Rain, Flash Flooding Possible Across Parts of Lower Mississippi Valley, Southeast" by NASA Goddard Photo and Video is licensed under CC BY 2.0
No comments:
Post a Comment