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By Brad Schrade and Nate Rau
THE TENNESSEAN
On a day when the Cumberland River continued to rise, crippling Middle Tennessee neighborhoods, businesses and several of Nashville's iconic music, sports and tourist spots, the most critical threat Monday night was that floodwaters would knock out the city's drinking supply.
The river crested downtown at close to 52 feet Monday evening - 24 hours after the initial prediction, and four feet higher than expected. That was the highest it has been since 1937.
As sandbag crews worked furiously into the evening, the city's remaining water treatment plant, just east of downtown on Omohundro Drive, was perilously close to being flooded. Such a turn would cast the historic flood of 2010 into a new level of crisis for more than 600,000 residents across Davidson County, and Brentwood, which relies on Metro's water.
"The next 24 hours are critical," said Scott Potter, head of Metro Water Services. "If the Omohundro goes down, we go to bottled water."
Nashville's other water treatment plant, K.R. Harrington, was overtaken by floodwaters Sunday, and officials have not been able to get near the Donelson-area facility to assess the damage. The plant outage had pushed Mayor Karl Dean to urge residents to cut water consumption in half, limiting use to essential tasks.
"I can't underscore the seriousness of this," the mayor said.
Water problems widespread
Water problems were not confined to Metro.
Residents in Cheatham, Williamson and Davidson who receive water from the Harpeth Valley Utilities District were also told to take steps to conserve water. That system was operating on generator power, and officials are asking residents to use water only for drinking, bathing and cooking.
In what turned out to be an otherwise sunny spring day, the state's death toll continued to rise, with the storm claiming 18 lives across the state. Ten of those lost were in Davidson County. And as homeowners and officials began trying to assess the damage to homes, buildings and roads, it was clear that the price tag for the storm was going to be high - with estimates ranging from hundreds of millions to billions of dollars.
With the waters still on the rise, officials were still largely in rescue mode across the region.
"Anybody who gets in a helicopter, you can see it's enormous," said Gov. Phil Bredesn, who formally requested federal emergency assistance while touring the 52-county disaster area. "It's a lot of damage. This is not $5 million. This is going to be a very, very expensive thing."
Many of downtown Nashville's most prominent buildings such as the Bridgestone Arena, the Schermerhorn Symphony Center and the Pinnacle Building suffered flood damages.
U.S. Rep. Jim Cooper guessed damages would reach the "multi-billion-dollar" level.
"This isn't just a 100-year flood," Cooper said. "People are now saying this could be a 500- or 1,000-year flood."
Another potentially devastating problem hanging over the city was a leaking levee at MetroCenter, north of downtown. State and Metro workers were placing sandbags along the levee at Mainstream Drive on Monday night. The residents and businesses in the area were evacuated. Among the businesses threatened was Second Harvest food bank, which had millions of dollars worth of food stored in a warehouse.
"If the levee should breach and the water does go into the MetroCenter, I can't estimate the damage in terms of cost of property or the potential damage to life," Dean said. "But, we do believe that potential is there and that's why we ordered an evacuation."
Red Cross officials estimated that 2,000 people were in shelters across Tennessee at one point as a result of flooding. They were unsure of the number in Middle Tennessee, but there were four shelters in Davidson County.
Other churches and community centers opened makeshift shelters on their own.
Also Monday, many residents across Nashville were still without power. Nashville Electric Service saw outages top 42,000 at the height of this weekend's storms. That number had dropped to just under 9,000 by the evening, which constituted nearly half of the 22,000 households across the state with lost power.
"We think we can get most of our customers back within two to three days," said NES spokeswoman Laurie Parker.
For about 7,000 customers in Bellevue and an additional 1,000 in Antioch, areas with extensive flooding of homes and NES substations, the power could be out much longer.
Dozens of businesses downtown and along the Cumberland River, including those in MetroCenter, requested power shutoffs because of dangerous flooding.
"It's hard to keep up with," Parker said.
Schools will continue to be disrupted today.
Metro Schools will again be closed, with more than 50 schools damaged, although none is considered major. Other school systems that are closed include Rutherford, Sumner, Wilson, and Cheatham counties. Williamson County Schools will open two hours late.
Many areas are underwater
From the air, the pervasiveness of the flood comes into focus. Whole streets and neighborhoods are underwater. Shopping centers, like Opry Mills, are submerged, and industrial businesses along the river had equipment tossed and twisted around by the river's current. There were stretches where all that could be seen was a lonely farmhouse roof poking from the waters.
Some of Nashville's key landmarks, including the Grand Ole Opry House, Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center, the Country Music Hall of Fame, and LP Field, were filled with muddy, debris-strewn waters.
Opryland said it would close its hotel and convention business for several months, while the Grand Ole Opry would temporarily move to the Ryman Auditorium.
Tom Turner, president and CEO of the Nashville Downtown Partnership, said officials are still evaluating possible damage to downtown tourist attractions.
Downtown saw waters rise Monday because of rainwater continuing to drain from higher areas, not necessarily because of the Cumberland River's rise.
Turner expected areas along the river to remain closed until the waters fully recede.
But as he spoke, he said businesses on Second Avenue were open and music was being played on Broadway. He said that though there will be inconveniences downtown in the coming days during the cleanup, the city is poised for recovery.
"We'll have to use that Nashville spirit to get it cleaned," he said.
Cities wait for for river's crest
The National Weather Service said Nashville crested Monday evening, but cities downriver on the Cumberland, such as Ashland City, Clarksville and Dover, may still have their worst days ahead. The crest in those places was expected today and possibly Wednesday. In Clarksville, the waters on Monday were already 15 feet above flood levels.
The Army Corps of Engineers, which manages the dam system that is designed to control the flow of waters along the Cumberland and its tributaries, said the storm was the most intense since the dam system was completed more than three decades ago.
As the storms pushed in from the west on Saturday, they dumped water in the lower parts of the river, creating a backstop, which offered nowhere for the waters to go as the storm pushed east. More than 15 inches were dumped within a two-day period, pushing the storm into a thousand year event.
Bob Sneed, the Army Corps' chief of water management for the river, said he started to grow worried Saturday when the storms kept pouring rain. Two critical areas that pushed the system to the limit were the Harpeth River and the waters behind Old Hickory Dam.
The Corps does not control flow along the Harpeth, which brought swift, flooding waters downstream to areas like Bellevue. The Old Hickory pool is relatively shallow and cannot hold amounts of water like what came down over the weekend.
So the Corps had to release water through the dam or risk overflow, which could damage the structure and even cause a catastrophic failure.
"The whole storm was more than we expected in terms of the volume," Sneed said. "It filled up the river. You run out of places to put the water."
The Cornelia Fort Airpark, which had sat in a bend along the Cumberland in East Nashville for nearly seven decades, was submerged Monday morning.
Bill Colbert Jr. stared in disbelief at what was left of the airfield his father helped start in December 1944. Colbert is 70 and said he can't recall the waters ever getting this high, even during the heavy floods in the 1970s.
About 20 to 25 planes were on the field Saturday when the rains started, and the water came down so hard and fast that there was no way to get them out. The taxiway and runway were covered.
While the field is for small and commuter planes, some were worth more than a $1 million, and Colbert said the destruction was so severe that he wasn't sure the field, already struggling, would be able to continue.
"A total loss," Colbert said. "It's heartbreaking. That's all I can say. Somebody put's his whole life into an organization. Now look at it."
Staff Writers Jaime Sarrio, Andy Humbles and Brian Haas contributed to this story. Information from The Associated Press was also used.
