This week’s Overdrive Radio podcast edition features the voices of six current longtime staff of the Nashville, Tenn., downtown TravelCenters of America location. It’s certainly a unique stop with its proximity to the city center, likewise just a few city blocks’ worth of distance from the banks of the mighty Cumberland River. TA Nashville’s continued existence at its now 40-year location is remarkable further for what happened nine years ago this past May, when over the weekend of May 1-2, 2010, the city and surrounding region got almost 20 inches of torrential rain in some areas, flooding the city’s drainage system, area creeks among other tributaries and, ultimately, that nearby mighty river.
As a resident, I spent that weekend lugging buckets of water sucked up by a 10-gallon shop vac from the basement of my home, but by the time the rain stopped, we were mostly dry in the immediate vicinity around where I live in East Nashville. I wouldn’t learn of the dire situation at TA Nashville before I got a call Monday morning from trucker Jeff Clark, who’d just come off a jog in the median between east- and west-bound I-40 west of town, stuck in a traffic jam of then-indeterminate-and-ongoing length ahead of the bridge over the Harpeth River, which was underwater.
I knew of that closure, and others around the region – no way I could get all the way out there in my car. So I jumped on a bicycle and pedaled to the TA, where men in rowboats were working to secure the area, several trucks were flooded up to their windshields, and the smell of fuel from the big pipeline terminal between TA and the river, under even deeper water, was ubiquitous on the high bridge into downtown that spanned it all.
I found a couple haulers parked in a nearby unused lot on slightly higher ground, both of whom were cooling their heels and waiting for word of a way out of the city, given the widespread nature of the calamity.
For the men and women behind the voices you’ll hear next, by then the uncertainty of what was to come was real. But perhaps the most frightening aspect of it all, watching all that water make its way higher and higher onto the truck stop lot, was more or less finished. Take a listen:
After reopening to much fanfare nine months after the flood, the Nashville TA — honoring owner-op Candy Bass now in its official name after Bass was honored the TA Petro Citizen Driver Awards some years back — continues to transform.
