The Point Is That People in the South Are Suffering
NASHVILLE — By now you’ve probably seen photos of the apocalyptic flooding in Middle Tennessee’s Dickson, Hickman, Houston and Humphreys Counties on Aug. 21, though it’s understandable if you scrolled right on past without really looking. There’s a déjà vu quality to such images. Cars lifted by some unstoppable force and returned to earth cattywampus. Houses at odds with their foundations, or just gone. Holes where roads used to be. The debris field of a bombing.
At least 20 people died in Middle Tennessee, and entire communities were wrecked beyond all recognition. If you let yourself think about the survivors, the pictures will break your heart.
“These are people we know. These are people’s families that we know,” Sheriff Chris Davis of Humphreys County told WPLN’s Damon Mitchell. “These are people that we grew up with.” The places that were nearly flattened by the flooding are small towns, or close-knit communities that can’t rightly be called towns, and nearly every family there is broken by loss. Many people lost everything they own.
If the pictures break your heart, it’s the stories that will kill you. The teenagers who went outside to take pictures and then watched as one of their own was carried away by a wall of water that came out of nowhere. The father trying to hold on to infant twins, or the mother trying to hold on to her toddler, powerless when the muddy water claimed them anyway. People frantically trying to help their neighbors, too many of them losing their lives in the process.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/30/opinion/tennessee-natural-disasters-climate-change.html
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