Flooding in Nashville kills at least 4 as water continues to rise

The body of a 65-year-old man was also found on a golf course near Lake J. Percy Priest, a reservoir along the city’s eastern outskirts, according to police, who said he appeared to have was swept away by high tide after getting out of a car that had hit a culvert.

Search and rescue efforts continued on Sunday, authorities said, as water levels continued to rise. The Cumberland River, which winds through Nashville, rose to the flood stage on Sunday afternoon and is expected to peak just after midnight Monday morning at nearly 42 feet, about 10 feet lower than the highest levels reached during the 2010 flood.

The flooding follows days of high winds and rain that swept through Nashville last week as powerful thunderstorms barred a swath of the southeast. Storms bombarded Nashville with hail, uprooted trees and cut electricity. Still, the city has been spared the worst of the havoc, as storms unleashed tornadoes that devastated communities in Alabama and Georgia, killing at least six people.

Yet the flooding presented another challenge for Nashville, and what some saw as another test of its resilience.

Beyond the specter of the 2010 floods, Nashville is also rebuilding itself after a deadly tornado a year ago that maimed parts of the city that had been the epicenter of its recent boom. He also returns from a man-made disaster, when a doomed man blew up a camper van full of explosives on Christmas morning, killing himself, leveling or severely damaging a swathe of buildings in the area. downtown and disrupting telecommunications across the region for days.

At Sunday’s press conference, Nashville Mayor John Cooper said city officials should examine the influence of climate change and determine whether the major flooding had become “once in a lifetime. but once in a decade of events. “

“This is an unexpected and uneven event,” Mr. Cooper said of the flooding, describing the rapidly changing forecast and the difficulty in predicting which streams would receive the most water. Even so, he added, “we will learn from it.”