WWQP Bulletin Board Chat

Tennessee and flooding

Rosey P - Our terrain is what one would call hilly. In most of middle Tennessee, one can dig down eighteen inches (a half-meter) and hit solid limestone rock. This is one cause of our flooding. Once the ground water, from rain, hits that rock, it has nowhere to go, runs off, and causes floods. This is one reason most of our homes do not have basements unless, like mine, they are a "daylight" basement because the home is built on a slope, or a home is built higher off the ground and soil is graded up.
Our frost line is also only 18 inches deep, due to our mild winters, so foundations do not have to be dug down several feet like they are in our northern states and Canada. Once you dig down that far, you might as well have the basement, and y'all don't sit on rock like we do--- the reason our official state song is "Rocky Top", http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_n9prNixjbg
and it is the unoffical school song of the University of Tennessee, in Knoxville. But I digress . . . ;o)
Most of our soil is a clay, not as pure clay as Georgia and Alabama, but lots of clay. It saturates quickly to a point, and then water runs off.

The creek that flooded I-24 on Saturday is prone to bad flooding, because so many minor creeks feed into it. I can't remember if I posted a link to the youtube.com video of that flood and remember---this is I-24, a federal interstate: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XyRNt2Uur8 You have to see this, to believe it.

The previous official record for rain - in one day - in Nashville was six inches, set in 1979. The new record was set this weekend, topping it by 1.5" but that amount is measured at the airport, which did not receive as much as the rest of Nashville. Two days of rain, with both days receiving 8 - 11 inches each, is going to make a flood anywhere. The amount of rain is incomprehensible, except to those who live in hurricane areas, or the midwest where similar rains and flooding have occurred in recent years. Only now can I fully understand what those folks have experienced.

posted by Doris W. in TN @ 7:41 AM