Mobilizing Guests Between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m., hotel guests were gathered in the ballroom. “You can imagine that there were a lot of folks in the place who were a little antsy about having their Sun- day evening messed up by having them move from their guest bedrooms—they couldn’t sit in a restaurant, they couldn’t watch TV,” Reed said. “We communicated all the reasons why we wanted to move them to safety.” While the NWS’s predictions had been consistent all after-
noon—the agency continued to maintain that water would peak about two feet fromthe top of the levee sometime the next morning— that wasn’t whatWestbrook and Allsbrooks saw with theirowneyes. “It’s the damnedest thing,”Westbrook told the group on the 7 p.m. call. “The water is visibly only six to eight inches from the top of the levee now.” It took less than three minutes for the team to decide what
to do next. The guests needed to be moved from the hotel to nearbyMcGavock High School, which had been pre-determined as the evacuation site. Reed urgedWeien: “Let’s get these buses moving.” Between 7 p.m. and 8 p.m., Gaylord staff checked every guest room. The hotel had lost power but was still on standby generation, so there was light.“We found one woman in a diabetic coma,” Reed said, “and another person hidingin a closet because they didn’t want to evacuate.” The whole evacuation process—involving about 1,500
guests—happened quickly and efficiently, in about an hour and a half. Reed’s teamwas ready to move everyone to safety,
“The thing that gives me chills is the notion of trying to evacuate the hotel at 11 p.m., as the waters were coming in, with no power. You walk through a hotel as big as Opryland at night with no power, and it is frightening.“
despite the fact that, because therewas no priorwarning, they didn’t have all the blankets, pillows, and foodstuffs that they would have liked for evacuees. One of the groups meeting at the hotel at that time—for a conference on security—was the Department of Defense’s Defense Information Systems Agency,which is headed by U.S. Army LieutenantGeneral Car- roll Pollett. Reed said that Pollett was positively “glowing about the way we handled this thing.” By 10:30 p.m., all ofGaylord’s seniormanagement teamwas
tending to the displaced guests at McGavock High School. One went out to buy 2,000 doughnuts for the next morning’s coffee. Around 11 p.m., Reed said, it occurred to them that “come five or six in the morning, there would probably be about 500 peo- plewhowanted to get on airplanes and move out of Nashville.” They quickly set up a virtual travel agency on site.
Over the Top “And then — this is one of the things that I am going to remember until the day I die,” Reed said, “there were a few folks who were moaning about us disrupting their evening and taking them out of the hotel, and we got a report at around 11:30 at night from the same people who had walked the levee at six that evening. The water now had breached the levee and was coming quickly over the top.” Reed got on the public-address system at the high school to update the crowd. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “we want to let you know that water came over the top of the levees an hour ago and we’ve now got six feet of water in our lobby.” You could have heard a pin drop in that room, he said. “The thing that gives me chills,” Reed said, “is the notion
of tryingto evacuate the hotel at 11 p.m., as the waters were com- ing in, with no power. Because we lost standby generation as water came over the top; the standby generators filled with water. So that place was black. Dark. You walk through a hotel as big as Opryland at night with no power, and it is frightening.” The next morning, Reed said, he and his team tried to fig-
ure out “what the hell went wrong here. What was wrong with the information we had?” He came to learn that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers—which was updating the NWS on the water releases coming out of Old Hickory Dam, north of Nashville—had made only four telephone calls to theNWS on Sunday. At noon, the Corps reported that 20,000 gallons of