In my last post, I mentioned Vitran Express and intermodal carrier TCW, both situated, along with other truck operations, Hascall Steel and many other businesses, along the rail tracks in
Two employees of Hascall, Rob and Frank, told the story of the inundated Milan Express rig you see in the first couple pictures here. The driver was stuck Sunday morning, they said, and
This street and the rail underpass might be the lowest point this far south of the Cumberland in this area, an urban canyon bordered on the east by a Penske Truck leasing facility on high ground, on the south and west by Hermitage Avenue and the I-24 span over the Cumberland. 
The good news is that the Cumberland had receded to the point that Hermitage Avenue was passable at its intersection with Driftwood and was passable for the first time in days, the Hascall folks said, allowing good access in and out for TCW and other drivers still able to move freight out of the rail terminal in the area, most of which was dry Tuesday. Sunday, the Hascall folks said, almost all roads into the area
I came upon TCW driver Paul Joyner Tuesday, parked on the high ground of Willow Avenue overlooking the devastation, and he was getting ready to hook a loaded container for movement — a sign that, in spite of all the difficulty, business goes on. TCW has yards in several cities throughout the Southeast, in any case, as well as a main-office location elsewhere in Nashville that is dry, thought this was their main terminal here.
Joyner speculated his carrier’s building, which you can just see beyond and right of the sign in these pictures, may well be a total loss. Fortunately, it looks like the majority of TCW equipment was able to be removed prior to the full inundation of the yard Sunday.
Vitran Express, situated across Visco from TCW, may not have been so lucky. You can see several of their rigs’ roofs in these pictures just ahead of the TCW sign, and in the video below.
Though the city’s resident remain under an emergency water-conservation order, 
When I talked with Rob and Frank of Hascall steel, they were waiting on a fellow Hascall employee to meet them there with a boat. They were planning to do what they could to assess what it would take to mitigate the damage as the waters continue to recede. While we were talking a homeless man named Freddie walked up and joined us momentarily in looking down flooded Driftwood St. After a minute or so, Freddie turned to me and said, “I lived down there.”
[kaltura-widget wid=”e8f32vm3qo” width=”400″ height=”365″ addpermission=”” editpermission=”” /]
UPDATE: Milan Express President Mike Stone just returned a call I put in this morning to say the company is fully operational into and out of Nashville, as are other companies in the area you seen in the video and pictures above. “We are up and running in Nashville,” he says. “We had an emergency and disaster plan in place and got that going immediately. We were able to rescue most of the freight and the equipment before the police made us leave Sunday,” as waters rose. That rescue operation likely resulted in the inundated Milan trailer you see in the pictures above, Stone speculated, though he couldn’t be certain.
