MCDONALD: Well, I have a fishing boat, and so when I drove down to Sawyer Brown Road I first saw a fire truck and asked the fireman if they needed a boat and he said well go ask someone else so I went and asked someone else and they said well go ask the guy under the tree there with the yellow shirt on. I later found out it was Bo Mitchell one of the councilmen here and, he said yea we could use a boat. And so I started to drive home and I thought, uh-oh I’m in trouble now, I’m gonna have to go get my boat and get outa this stuff. And so I got the boat, I hitched it up by myself and went inside and changed clothes into shorts and a T shirt and Tevas knowing that there was no way was gonna stay dry and so I may as well enjoy being we, and so hustled out of the house and took the boat down to Sawyer Brown Road and I hadn’t really thought about it but it wasn’t a boat ramp that I was putting my boat into it was just the road that was flooded and so normally a boat ramp is gonna be steeper and so anyway it took five of us to get the boat off the trailer to get it in the water. It was about that time, no one really knew what to do, I mean , no one knew what the situation was really, everybody was just doing the best they could. The Fire department wasn’t in control, there was no government official in control, it was just people there, and so people were giving addresses on slips of paper that ultimately faded because of the rain and I didn’t know where the stuff was anyway and so we just drove around looking for people to help and one of the guys in my boat said that his parents were way off somewhere across the Harpeth River which we went down there trying to find it but it was not passable. And so we went to the clubhouse and started helping people evacuate out of the clubhouse. So that was the beginning of the morning.
GIBBONS: OK, so how many people did you help, do you remember?
MCDONALD: I t was probably 50 or 60 anyway. A variety of people from old to young, black, white, dogs, cats, some people in shock, some people laughing. Yea, so there was a pretty good variety of people. There was all kinds of stuff floating, there were outhouses floating. There was a police car all the way under water up to its headlights. A little on further up the road there was a car totally submerged that I hit and there were maybe two or three other boats out there doing the same thing. So we were all going in different directions.
Excerpted from: Rob McDonald 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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