Flooding in Tennessee.

I've been working down in Humboldt, Tennessee for the past week or so.  We were here this time to finish up what was left over from when I was here for a mudfest back in March.  The weather started off much nicer this time, but in the wee hours of Saturday morning, a slow-moving cold front moved in that ultimately dumped 12-15" of rain and spawned a few tornadoes.  As usual, I'll let the pictures do most of the talking.  Here's the radar from Friday night:

The hotel I'm staying in is in Jackson, TN, a bit to the right of the center image.  The areas outlined in red polygons are tornado warnings.
















As the storm moved through,  it sort of stalled right over Jackson, and thunderstorms kept building up behind it and moving in.  About 3am Saturday morning, I was awoken to the eerie sound of tornado sirens.  I remember hearing it when I was a kid in Mississippi, and it still gives me the chills.
 
Since my truck and the drill rig were parked 200 yards into a soft field and below a giant oak tree, the I was quite worried about a bunch of rain, not to mention the prospect of a tornado.

 The truck, drill rig, and other equipment before the storm on Friday evening.  First signs of impending doom cloud the horizon.

After getting about 3 hours of sleep, I got up to begin my day at 5:45am.  Took a shower, got dressed, put on my raingear before even going outside.  I decided not to bring my rain pants this time because I figured there was no way it could be that wet again.  So, once I found out nasty weather was on the way, I bought a cheap PVC rainsuit at Sprawl-Mart.  The pants lasted 5 minutes before the crotch ripped out.  The hole got progressively larger, until I eventually I was basically wearing what looked like chaps.  Still, better than nothing.  Anywho, so I walk outside, not too worried about a bunch of rain (it's just rain after all) and pleased that there don't seem to be high winds.  I hop in the car and get ready to begin the 15-minute drive up to Humboldt.  However, I don't make it very far.
 

This building eventually had water 3 feet up the back wall and an adjacent restaurant was ruined by water damage.  When I saw that my way out was flooded, I got in touch with Dave C (our client) so he could pick me up on the main road.  While I was checking out the situation, a poor soaked-to-the-bone guy came over and asked me if I had jumper cables because his car had died.  Unfortunately my rental car didn't, and I asked a few other folks around to no avail.  I did give him the Wal-Mart raincoat, since I wasn't going to need it.  Since I had rain gear and boots on, I decided to wade around and check out just how deep it was.  While I was doing that, a big Dodge truck pulled up and said it was over his hood.  I waded around enough to find a shallow route out that got him, and eventually me to the main road.  His engine is clearly a lot higher off the ground than my little rental car, but I made it too.

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So, I was able to drive myself to work after all.  When I got to Humboldt, here are some of the things I saw:

 

The pictures are a bit blurry, but I think you get the idea.  Fortunately, this spot was actually pretty well drained.  There was fast-moving water running between my truck and the 55-gallon drum.  Here's a closer look:


We're not supposed to work in lightning, because having 100' of steel rods in the grounds acts as a giant lightning rod.  The storms sort of came in pulses though, so there were brief periods where it let up and we could advance the rods (operating that big machine), then sit around while I sampled for an hour or so.  Then repeat.  Despite the insane weather, we actually had a pretty productive day.  We decided to call it a day about 5:30pm, and attempted to head home.  However the road back to Jackson was closed due to flooding.  We rendezvoused at Pizza Hut to figure out what to do.

A short break in the weather as we try to figure out what to do.

Just to the north of the site, the road crosses a small creek on a short bridge.  As you can see, the creek has hugely flooded its banks and the water is a good bit higher than the guardrails on the bridge!  Hmm.

All but one road out of Humboldt was closed at the time we were headed out.  However, after a bit at Pizza Hut (which I don't think I've been to since my elementary school "Book-it" days) we heard of a way out from the waitress.  We packed up our pizza and went for it.  After taking a circuitous route over some almost flooded roads, we made it back to the highway that would take us to Jackson.  However, before long, we ran into this:

About a mile of road flooded.  Lots of traffic backed up wondering what to do.  Fortunately, Dave C had a GPS, so we decided to try another route.  That led to lots of this:

And a couple more of these:

Eventually we gave up on getting back to Jackson for the night, and resigned ourselves to either finding a hotel in Humboldt, or buying air mattresses and sleeping in one of the site buildings (I think I was the only one who'd have done that).  Every Hotel in Humboldt was full, so we finally made it to a town about 45 minutes away where we stayed in some flea-ridden, weird-smelling place for $100/night.  We got the last rooms.  That place made a fortune that night.  Even though the place smelled funny and I had blood stains (not mine) on the pillow, it was good to finally be able to get some sleep.
However, that wasn't going to last long.  Sometime during the night another major front came through and brought more tornadoes and torrential rain.  Another sleepless night with blaring tornado sirens.  We all got up and made it back to the site to pull out the tooling and pack up all the gear.  The rain continued all morning, and by the time I was ready to move my truck, there was no way I was going to get out under my own power.  The driller and I hooked chains up to the GeoProbe and he began to pull me out backwards.  Normally, this works fine, but the field was by no means normal.  The GeoProbe (the biggest one available) was getting pretty bogged down itself.  After about half an hour of whiplash and flying mud, we finally got it out.  Here's how it looked from my perspective:

Finally got everything out of there.  Took a good while to pack up the truck and have it ready to drive.  Took quite a while to get all the mud out of the rear wheels too.
I finished packing up a bit before the drillers and had a little time to look around a little.  I happened upon this old oak that looks like it's been through a lot.

When were ready to roll out, we got the news that the road to Jackson was still closed.  Apparently several of the bridges had some significant damage, probably wash-outs.  We ended up taking a 100-mile detour to get back...

The sun eventually came out and we got to see some pretty scenery, but it sucked having to drive 2 hours to get somewhere 15 miles away.  I don't think I've ever been so happy to make it back to my hotel room.  The past few days have been quite an adventure.
I haven't heard what kind of damage occurred, but I'm pretty sure there were at least a few drownings.  Despite the inconvenience it caused us, at least no one got hurt.  All told, over 12" of rain fell in less than 24 hours.  I imagine the total storm total was a good bit more.  Here is the storm total map from the NWS from this morning:

Most of the streams and rivers went up by 12 or more feet!  Here's the gauge from a creek somewhere to the west:

This particular stream raised by 14 feet.  I don't think I've ever seen a stream gauge rise that much, that fast.

The discharge went from about 550cfs (cubic feet per second) to over 35,000cfs.  To put that into perspective, the Winooski River that runs through Montpelier often runs about 200-1,000cfs in the summer.  The highest I've seen it get since I've lived in Vermont (after snowmelt and heavy rains) was about 10,000cfs.
Regardless, we're talking about a LOT of water.

Last time I looked the storm was still rolling along, but losing some power.  I imagine I'll be following it most of the way home...