Deja Awful

Anyone else getting that 2008 feeling watching the heart of Nashville fill up with brown water from the swollen Cumberland River?

From the Tennessean, which has great coverage:

As darkness set in across the soaked and battered Middle Tennessee region Sunday evening, Nashville began evacuating homes and businesses along the rising Cumberland River.

The storms that started Saturday have left 11 dead across the state, including five in Davidson County and one in Williamson County. Thousands of cars, homes and basements are filled with water. Entire neighborhoods are submerged, and hundreds of people are in shelters.

Authorities were just beginning to comprehend the damage. Late Sunday, Nashville announced that it was shutting down a water treatment plant and that a levee in MetroCenter along the Cumberland River had begun to leak.

After an aerial survey early Sunday evening, Mayor Karl Dean said the damage was worse than he thought.

"This situation is going to require a very large recovery process," Dean said. "The magnitude of the damage to our community was much more than what I expected. … The safety of some of our infrastructure is questionable."

Worse than expected. We've been there. And like Cedar Rapids, some of Nashville's cultural icons are hard-hit.

From the Washington Post:

Country music's landmark, the Grand Ole Opry House, was flooded with several feet of water, and at least 10 feet of water flooded the nearby Gaylord Opryland Hotel complex, indefinitely shutting down one of the nation's largest hotel and convention centers. The historic Ryman Auditorium -- the former home of the Grand Ole Opry -- and the recording studios of Music Row were not in immediate danger.

Downtown was nearly deserted after authorities evacuated the area. Floodwater spilled into some streets near the riverfront, and restaurants and bars were closed. Water filled the basement of the Schermerhorn Symphony Center where pianos were stored and seeped into a mechanical room in the Country Music Hall of Fame.

"It's shocking to see it this way, but it was an incredible storm," Mayor Karl Dean said as he surveyed the flooding on Monday.

The Red Cross is, of course, on the case, and is taking donations.

The toughest thing about watching this saga unfold is knowing what these folks are about to go through.

The federal government still does not have a single agency or process  for long-range recovery efforts, even after Katrina, 2008 etc. FEMA is built well for immediate response, but after that, we're left with a patchwork of agencies and a web of red tape at every level. A smart, wealthy country like this one with heavily populated coasts, fault lines, Tornado alley and any number of other hazards ought to be a lot better prepared.

And I don't know about you, but the more I see these "unprecedented" disasters, the more I wonder why we're suddenly setting so many awful records. Nashville got more than 13 inches of rain in 36 hours, more than double the previous rainfall record and it's a quarter of Nashville's total annual average precip.

 The federal government had better be wondering, too, including an Army Corps of Engineers. Those 70s flood protection models the corps uses that insist these incidents are flukes need some serious updating.