Flooded Opry Mills mall's revival begins

The Opry Mills shopping center — once bustling with crowds of bargain-hunting shoppers — is now overrun with workers in protective coveralls, hard hats and respirator masks hauling out racks of clothing and other mud-caked merchandise damaged by raging floodwaters.

The mall was so hard hit that Tuesday was the first day its owner, Simon Property Group, allowed anyone not affiliated with the cleanup to tour a portion of the site.

"You don't encounter these very often. It's definitely on the high end of the scale in terms of … how badly it was damaged," said Kirk Lively, manager of the large loss division at Belfor, a Michigan-based restoration company hired to clean up Opry Mills' nearly 1.2 million square feet of space.

Merchants ranging from Bass Pro Shops to the Nike Factory Store have until Sunday to get all their merchandise out as restoration work continues at a mall that took on as much as 9 feet of water at the height of flooding last week.

Floodwaters ran deepest near the sprawling Regal Cinema, a section of the mall situated closest to the Opryland Resort & Convention Center, a hotel complex owned by Gaylord Entertainment that was also hit hard when the Cumberland River poured over protective levees.

On Tuesday, huge machines pumped warm, dehumidified air into the damp mall's corridors and shops. Crews tore out drywall, removed soggy carpet and got rid of porous tile and wood by throwing it into dumpsters.

Generators droned loudly, providing power to the building that has been without electricity since the flooding.

Officials with Simon Property Group, one of the nation's biggest owners of commercial real estate, can't say what the final dollar tally of damages will be or when the mall will be fit for customers again. Tenants include many national brands and retail chains from Saks Fifth Avenue to Hot Topic.

Source: Tennessean.com