Nashville has changed in five years following historic flood of 2010
Kim Chaudoin | 615.966.6494 |
Five years ago this past weekend, Nashville and the Lipscomb community experienced one of the worst weather events in the city’s history.
Rainfall exceeded 17 inches, the highest amount in more than 140 years of recorded history in Nashville. More than 13 inches of rain fell in a 36-hour span May 1-2, 2010, more than doubling the previous two-day rainfall record set in 1979. The Cumberland River crested at 51.68 feet, 12 feet above flood stage. The flood resulted in an estimated $2 billion in damages to private property, with a reported 2,773 businesses affected. Eleven people died as a result of the flood.
Although streets near campus were flooded, the university didn’t experience much damage from floodwaters. But as rains poured down and waters rose, the first Nashville Red Cross rescue shelter in the city was opened at Lipscomb. On May 1, evacuees began pouring into the shelter.
By the second day, the shelter was filled to capacity with 200 guests who slept on cots set up in the Student Activities Center. Many students quickly volunteered their time, brought clothing out of their dorm room closets and assisted in the effort to shelter neighbors during the storm. Lipscomb provided blankets, clothes, shoes, toys for kids and volunteers.
It was not until May 18 that the Red Cross closed the refuge. The nearly 450 total inhabitants included about 100 who were homeless before the flood.
Billie Ford, a Lipscomb sophomore at the time and native of Nashville served at the shelter on several occasions throughout the duration. In the months following the flood, the nursing major continued her relationships with the people she met while volunteering and attributed a new appreciation of her blessings to the friends she met in the shelter. “I still think about them all the time,” she recalled. “It helped me prioritize things and made me want to help more.”
In the five years that have passed, homes have been rebuilt, measures have been put in place to help prevent a similar incident from occurring again and many policies have been debated and implemented. But there is still much work to be done.
Dodd Galbreath, founding director of Lipscomb University’s Institute for Sustainable Practice, has been on the frontline of the issue in the years following the flood as a member of Mayor Karl Dean’s storm water management board. He is co-author of the Nashville NEXT Natural Resources & Hazard Adaptation plan. As such, he is highly familiar with how the city has tried to eliminate obvious issues that arose during the flood as well as issues that still need to be addressed.
“There is a natural cycle of risk that we experience. It can’t be avoided, but it can be mitigated,” says Galbreath. “The flood was caused by a natural storm that was naturally aggressive. But we made it more aggressive by unknowingly and knowingly damaging and eliminating the protection that naturally occurs in our environment. In the years following the flood, the city has eliminated a number of the obvious issues and is still working on other fixes that are needed.”
Metro and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers have explored new levees and flood walls through feasibility studies. Nashville officials have also taken important steps to shore up its flood response efforts and have developed resources such as SAFE (Situational Awareness for Flooding Events), a sophisticated mapping and real-time data tool that the city developed after the 2010 flood.
Galbreath says that cities such as Philadelphia and Seattle are investing in green infrastructure, which uses “God’s design” to mitigate the affects of natural occurrences such as flooding.
“The human desire to control the environment is incompatible to that environment,” he explains. “We have to ‘partner’ with God to use His design to protect the world around us.”
As a senior policy executive working for two gubernatorial administrations of two different political parties, Galbreath led many successful strategic initiatives resulting in passage of historic laws to manage rivers in West Tennessee as natural systems; to manage water transfers between southeastern rivers; and to add transparency to in-state water uses to protect state water rights and taxpayer liability. He has also led policy and planning for wetlands conservation, environmental justice, design standards for sustainable storm water systems, climate change adaptation and sustainable communities.
Some additional measures that city planners should consider to prevent future floods include keeping hillsides as well as the area between downtown and hilltops as spongy as possible, he said. He said having more density downtown with taller structures will “greatly eliminate risk and policy and regulation will take care of the rest.”
One of the functions of the Institute for Sustainable Practice is to lead in developing initiatives and engaging in practices that help the campus and community. In the days prior to the flood and in the years following, Galbreath said ISP students and administrators have been involved in a number of water management projects on campus and in the neighborhood including:
- Installing a small flood water harvesting demonstration at Lipscomb’s McFarland Science Center;
- Installing a small flood water absorbing, native landscape garden and outdoor learning space with porous paving on campus;
- Adding a denser tree canopy to the center of campus;
- Launching a creek restoration project in the Fall of 2014 for the west fork of Brown's Creek on the Lipscomb Academy Elementary School campus and with private landowners;
- Planting 850 trees on the west fork of Brown's Creek this spring (adding to a total of 3,400 trees planted by Cumberland River Compact with funding from the Tennessee Division of Forestry);
- Starting a pilot project at Lipscomb Academy Elementary School to restore a creek to its natural scientific plant diversity to show how local landowners can bring flood absorbing function and beauty back to their landscapes;
- Participating in the Annual Weed Wrangle to remove invasive plants that prevent healthy, varied, water absorbing trees from thriving; and
- Taking faculty and staff on annual tours of a faculty member's home in the neighborhood, which has demonstrated flood water-absorbing landscapes.
For more information about Lipscomb’s Institute for Sustainable Practice, click here.