DISNEY: I will never forget, there at the corner of Loch Two Road and Penn Meade Way, there were swift water rescue boats from the fire department, right there. And—sorry (voice breaks). And they said, “We’re taking women and children first.”
And so my phone is in my purse and it starts blowing up and I can’t get it, I can’t answer it. But so I felt so sorry for this young couple, they had a brand new baby that was about six weeks old and they got to go first and he had to stay behind. And so I believe I got on the second boat going out but I had to wade out into water, about up to my knees and I got in this boat and I’ll never forget, it just felt so surreal.
They took me down—I thought, “I’m leaving my home. I don’t know what it’s going to look like when I get back and I don’t know what I’m going to do.” And so they took me out as far, took us out as far as they could, we could go.
And my friend Nikki had driven down Pennington Bend as far as she could and she had backed into a driveway. She said, “I’m three driveways down.”
So I had like three small suitcases with me with enough clothes for about three days. And they said, they stopped the boat and said, “We can’t go any farther, we’re going to drag the bottom.”
So I got out in water up to my waist, nasty smelling water. You could smell chemicals and pesticides and sewage, and so I waded out and there was a big bus on the left. And I said, “What is that bus for?” And he said, “If you don’t have anywhere to go, we’re taking people to McGavock High School.” And I said, “Well, I have a friend that’s waiting on me.”
And so I walked down to where she was and she got me and took me. We couldn’t get out on Briley Parkway because it was flooded so we had to go through Donelson to get back to Mt. Juliet. And so I saw the news the next day and saw that there was probably about two feet of water in my house. And so, I still at the time could not wrap my brain around the fact that my home was gone, my car was gone, and so the rebuilding process started from right there.
Excerpted from: Charlotte Disney Oral History Interview. Born-digital recording(s) converted to mp3 format for online access in 2012 from 16bit 44.1khz WAV file archival master recording.
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