KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — One Kentucky city is recovering tonight after floods washed through neighborhoods, downtown, roads, and more.
The floods forced emergency workers to call in rescue teams as the speed of the water coming in intensified
“It’s sad but we're going to overcome,” said Donald Buttery, a small business owner in Middlesboro.
Many residents of the Kentucky city woke up with water rising on main streets in their backyards and even cars submerged. For Donald Buttery, his business filled with more than a foot of water.
“We tried vacuuming it and it just started coming in fast and it got up to 14 inches of water,” Buttery said.
Mayor Rick Nelson said this has become all too familiar.
“About once a year we seem to have a flood and it affects a pretty big part of the city and kind of shut us down,” said Ricks.
Emergency officials' experiences with past floods in the area prepared them for the worst.
“All hands on deck today we had every resource we had available out to mitigate any emergency we needed to,” Middlesboro Fire Chief Robert England said.
The situation deteriorated so badly emergency officials were forced to call in rescue teams.
“We had several residents and several houses that were surrounded with water and the water was rising at a rate that they could very much have been underwater,” said England.
Now they start the long process of draining out what’s left of this flood, but they know the cost of this flood will be a high one.
“Yea I’ve lost over a hundred thousand dollars worth of merchandise. My display room is destroyed it’s a hard comeback,” said Buttery.
By late evening, most of the water across the city had receded and emergency officials are going to begin to clean up Monday.