McEWEN (Tennessee): Catastrophic flooding in Middle Tennessee left at least ten people dead and dozens missing on Saturday as record-shattering rainfall washed away homes and rural roads, authorities said on Sunday.

Business owner Kansas Klein watched in horror from a bridge on Saturday morning as cars and entire houses were swept down a road in Waverly, a town of about 4,500 people that Klein, 48, has called home for more than half his life. Two girls who were holding on to a puppy and clinging to a wooden board swept past, far too fast for Klein and other onlookers to go down and grab hold of them.

After being told by authorities to go back, Klein returned a couple hours later, shocked that the floodwaters had almost entirely receded and aghast at the destruction that was left behind.

“It was amazing how quick it came and how quick it left,” Klein said.

He said his restaurant, a decade-old New York-style pizzeria, was still standing, but the morning deluge of between 10 and 12 inches of rain in Humphrey’s County had caused floodwaters to reach seven feet inside the eatery, rendering it a total loss.

After leaving his restaurant, Klein walked to the nearby public housing homes and heard yelling. A man had just recovered a baby’s body from one of the homes. Other bodies would soon follow. The City of Waverly’s Public Water System is under a “boil water advisory” until further notice.

The low-income homes in dozens of block buildings known as Brookside appeared to have borne the brunt of the flash flood, Klein said.

“It was devastating: buil­dings were knocked down, half of them were destro­yed,” Klein said. “People were pulling out bodies of people who had drowned and didn’t make it out.”

Humphrey’s County Sheriff Chris Davis told news outlets more than 30 people had been reported missing. It was not immediately clear how many had lived at Brookside, located about 96 kilometres west of Nashville.

Four shelters were set up on Saturday night for residents whose homes flooded, and a high school in McEwen was being used to reunite families. Phone lines knocked out during and after the storm complicated search efforts, the sheriff’s office said in a statement.

“There were people inside homes asleep and woke up to their house moving, like it was going down the creek,” said McEwen resident Michael Pate.

Published in Dawn, August 23rd, 2021