Water surged beyond the banks of the Obion River early Sunday, breaching levees and leading to the evacuation of nearly everyone in the small West Tennessee town of Rives as roads and homes flooded.
The National Weather Service in Memphis issued a flash flood emergency by Sunday morning, confirming that the levee had failed near the town just south of Union City. Areas surrounding Rives saw around 7 inches of rainfall Saturday, according to NWS Memphis meteorologist Amber Schlessiger.
Footage of the aftermath shows water completely covering residential streets, leaving partially submerged vehicles to suggest where roads and driveways might be. The floodwaters swallowed part of State Route 22 and left nearby baseball diamonds discernible only by their protruding fence line and dugouts.
Obion County Mayor Steve Carr declared a state of emergency in the town of about 250 people Sunday afternoon and urged any remaining residents to heed mandatory evacuation orders. No deaths have been reported, but Carr said in a Sunday news conference that “hearts are heavy” for a few people who were injured.
Obion County Emergency Management Agency Director Danny Jowers said close to 200 people evacuated by Monday afternoon, including about 100 people who were brought to safety by swift water rescue teams. While evacuations have stopped and water has begun to recede in some parts of town, the flooding isn’t over yet.
NWS Memphis canceled the flood emergency for the area on Monday but issued another flood warning for a larger swath of Obion County as the excess water moves downstream.
With frigid temperatures settling in for the rest of the week, officials are pleading with residents to stay away from their flooded homes. Jowers said homes that were inundated with water will have to be cleared by a state inspector before electricity can be turned back on.
Temperatures are expected to dip into single digits by Thursday morning, with windchill driving them into the negatives, Schlessiger said. The area could get between 3-5 inches of snow by Wednesday afternoon.
“It could be life-threatening cold for people that don’t have any heat,” she said.
It’s not clear yet how many homes and other buildings are damaged, Jowers said. They’ll have a better idea once the weather warms up.
But while the damage may be devastating to the small community, Jowers said it’s likely not enough to qualify for federal assistance for disaster recovery.
“FEMA’s not coming here,” he said.
Local officials say this flood stands out in recent memory“Nature hasn’t been so good to us the last day or two,” Rives Mayor Lester Burnes said in a news conference Sunday.
The area is prone to flooding. Rives Fire Chief Campbell Rice said he’s worked floods in the town every year for 35 years.
“I’ve never seen one like this one,” Rice said.
Jowers, who has lived in the area for most of his 65 years, said this flood will never eclipse the Great Ohio River Flood of 1937, but the damage may “get close” to flooding caused by severe weather in 1997.
“It’s been a long time (since water has) ever come over the top of that levee,” he said. “It’s been a long time since I saw State Route 22 closed, too.”
NWS Memphis doesn’t have a data collection gauge in Rives, so they can’t directly compare the severity of this flooding event with previous floods.
“It is pretty significant that the waters were able to top that levee,” Schlessiger said.
Strike teams from Madison County, Collierville, Tipton County, Millington, Lake County and Gibson County deployed to Rives to help with the flood response. Those teams began to return home Monday.
The flood in West Tennessee comes a few weeks after the Tennessee General Assembly approved a disaster relief package for communities recovering from Hurricane Helene on the opposite end of the state. Deadly flash flooding destroyed hundreds of homes and swept away roads and bridges in September. The aid package passed by state lawmakers included a $100 million disaster response program for Hurricane Helene recovery and future state emergencies and $110 million over three years to aid local governments impacted by Helene.
This story was originally published by the Tennessee Lookout.
