Residential roads and homes sit inundated with floodwater in Rives, Tenn. on Sunday, Feb. 16, 2025. (Photo: Jacob Fulbright)
Mary Kilburn said she cried for two days after flooding forced her and her neighbors to evacuate the small town of Rives in northwest Tennessee.
Raging water from torrential downpours on Feb. 14 and 15 began to wash over the top of the levee protecting the town from Hoosier Creek, which feeds into the North Fork Obion River. By early morning on Feb. 16, officials began mandatory evacuations, fearing the possibility of a complete levee failure.
The levee held, but the swollen river swallowed Rives’ streets, submerging vehicles and creeping into houses. Around 200 people evacuated, and no deaths were reported, according to county officials.
Kilburn, 57, moved to Rives in 2017 with her three children, turning over a new leaf after a divorce. She’d spotted a house while driving through the town and “something just kept drawing me back to it,” she said.
The 122-year-old home has “huge” pocket doors, 12-foot ceilings and three fireplaces, Kilburn said. The day she moved in, a neighbor knocked on her door with a cake to welcome her to the neighborhood. The flood that came about a year later was a rude awakening — Kilburn didn’t know Rives was prone to floods when she moved there.
She said she is “one of the lucky ones.” Her house sits up higher than others, and in past floods, water has made it under the house but not inside. She wasn’t home when she heard about the evacuations this time, and by then, the roads were already closed to incoming traffic.
“(It was) the not knowing, the fear of losing the house that I’d worked so hard (for), because I had raised my three kids by myself, and that’s the house I bought for us and started over,” Kilburn said. “To think that it can all be taken away, it was just heartbreaking.”
Kilburn was able to return to her home on Feb. 18 when water was still several inches deep, thanks to her lifted truck. The water didn’t make it into her house, but she’s worried that the frequent flooding over the last few years is damaging its foundation.
Out of the 105 houses in Rives, around 25 had significant damage in the recent flood, Obion County Mayor Steve Carr said Friday. The entire town experienced some level of destruction, and Carr expects crews will be patching a lot of roads and repairing degraded culverts. Power was restored to all homes in Rives by Feb. 21, he said.
Gov. Bill Lee, Tennessee Emergency Management Agency Director Patrick Sheehan and Congressman David Kustoff visited Rives on Feb. 18 to begin assessing the damage and the town’s recovery needs.
Severe weather brought extensive damage to several parts of the state that weekend, Lee said, and recovery will be a coordinated effort between local, state and federal officials. Kustoff will ensure that coordination, Lee said.
But asking for federal aid requires damage to meet a certain threshold that overwhelms state and local resources, and determining eligibility takes time.
The Southern Baptist Disaster Relief Team will arrive this week to provide free cleanup and restoration assistance, Carr said. He’s also collecting donations to help residents cover immediate costs.
Flooding devastates small West Tennessee town ahead of cold snap
“Some of them don’t have insurance, so it’s going to be a costly restoration process,” he said. “I’m trying to get donations where I have enough money to take care of them.”
Counting the cost
The financial and emotional costs of weathering floods are wearing on Rives’ residents.
Kilburn said flood insurance has become so costly that the majority of her neighbors cannot afford it. Many are elderly or have families and aren’t prepared for reconstruction costs. They need some kind of relief from the federal and state governments, she said, especially with the levee.
“That seems to be a big problem and it keeps reoccurring,” Kilburn said. “Maybe if they come in and do something, our little town will be safe.”
Rives officials agree. Carr said he’s hoping to get some federal funding for the major expense to heighten the levee and add permanent, stationary pumps that could direct water away from the town.
“Even though we’re a little, small area, we’ve got needs too,” Carr said during Lee’s visit.
The town currently uses mobile pumps, but decided to shut them down to lessen the risk of complete levee failure when water flowed over the top of the levee — which is an old railroad bed — according to a social media statement from the Obion County Emergency Management Agency. The CN railroad, which meets up with the levee and serves as protection for the town’s east side, was not overrun by water and continued operating.
“Had the levee completely failed, the entire town would have been swept away within minutes as millions of gallons of water would have entered unchecked,” the post states.
The levee and other flood control structures in Rives are not owned or managed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the corps confirmed.
Hagan Payne has lived in Rives all of his 24 years. His parents and grandmother live across the street.
He said the water was about knee-deep in his yard at around 10 a.m. on Feb. 16. He went to go check on his grandmother and was met instead by emergency crews in a rescue boat instructing them to evacuate.
Payne’s house had some water damage, but everything stored in sheds on the property was ruined. Payne said he had just replaced those items not too long ago — they had been hit pretty hard by a flood in 2023.
Having flood insurance didn’t help him much with the cost of repairs after the 2023 flood, he said. It did cover the cost of getting their waterlogged air conditioning unit fixed, but his annual premium went up around $200 after that claim.
“It’s becoming pretty common,” Payne said of the town’s flooding issues. “I’m about ready. I wish the state would buy us out.”
State or local governments can purchase certain flood-prone properties from residents and keep the land as open space, but homes must first be determined eligible.
Kilburn, on the other hand, is determined to stay. Her neighbors have pulled together to help each other, she said.
But the ordeals have left their mark — after the first flood she experienced, she keeps a box of a few of her late parents’ belongings within reach, ready to “grab them and go.”
For now, her attention is on putting the town back together.
“The work is now fixing to get started for everybody with all this cleanup … and who knows, it could do this again in another week or two. You never know what the weather’s going to do,” she said.
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