It Never Fails

Jeff and I seem to have a knack for being at the wrong place at the wrong time or we get lucky and hit everything when it isn't busy or crazy....well these last two weeks have been on the wrong place, wrong time mode. We ended up in Tennessee for the most rain they have had in their history, 20" in 2 days. The floods were incredible and the stories we heard from local people are truly sad and heartwarming. I have a few pics, but our job was to stay on high ground and make sure our load was safe, so we didn't get too close to downtown Nashville. We were about 25 miles SE of there when we decided it wasn't safe to be driving any further. We pulled into a truck stop to check the weather on the TV and it was incredible. Tornado warnings, Flash flood warning

s and the Interstate 24 we were traveling on was closed about 12 miles up the road....okay, so that part did swing us to the lucky side. Some truckers were not so lucky. They were parked at the TA right in the heart of Nashville. The water got so high that boats had to start coming in to rescue drivers because the water rose so quickly it started coming into the cab through the windows...it was that high. The Cumberlin River rose to 48' in the heart of the city. We waited out the storm for 2 days and finally decided according to the chatter on the CB and TV reports that we should try to make our way over to Interstate 40. Well, other people had this same idea!

It was like a parking lot...no literally a parking lot. These trucks had been lined up on the road for the last 24 hours waiting for the interstate to re-open. There were about 4 - 5 rivers that cross under the 40, but at that time they were flowing over the 40, so it

was probably a really good thing that the highway was shut down. Nashville is a hard place to be stuck. There isn't a simple alternative route to take and heading NW or just West for that matter....Nashville is the hub that every truck has to come through.