West Tennessee town remains underwater after catastrophic flooding
RIVES, Tenn. — Flooding continues in parts of West Tennessee following the storms over the weekend.
The water levels in Rives continue to remain high, and the flooding has impacted many residents in the area. In fact, we spoke with the Vice Mayor, Craig McCord, who said that flooding of this level is something that they really have never seen before.
“We’ve got houses underwater now that have never had water in them in this whole town’s life,” McCord said. “I mean, it’s just something catastrophic. You know, this is a poor economic town, and a lot of these folks aren’t going to recover financially.”
The TWRA was out with a boat seeing if there was anything they could help with. Also, McCord said that they had some plans in place for today so people can get some medications if they are needed.
“We’re going to try to help people get into their home to get like medications and things like that, that they had to leave yesterday. But we don’t want everybody coming here. Go to Ridgemont Elementary School and speak with the fire chief of Rives, and he’ll coordinate all of that,” said McCord.
McCord also told us that help is going to be needed from high levels in order to prevent this from happening again.
“We’re going to need help trying to keep this from ever happening again,” McCord said. “That’s going to come from Nashville, I hope. And the federal government, I hope. But we don’t need this ever happening again and ruining people’s lives.”
Of course, there are many roads that are still flooded and impassable. In fact, we stood on a road this morning where in the distance, you could see that a car tried to pass and became stalled out, and the car was stuck there for some time. It is important to make sure to not try to cross these roads. You never know how deep it actually gets.
Obion County Sheriff Karl Jackson says that multiple agencies are onsite helping in many different ways. He also says that no unauthorized vehicles will be allowed entry.
We will continue to update you as this situation develops.
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