‘Tired of worrying about water’: Kentuckians grapple with historic flooding — Marquee | Film & Video Production

Leona and Elijah Stepp, lifelong residents of Inez, Kentucky, were five years into renting an 80-foot double-wide trailer on New Berry Lane, between the Middle Fork of the Kentucky River and Rockcastle Creek, when it began raining the night of Sunday, February 29.

Around 9:30 p.m., they noticed the water coming up. Elijah saw a gas tank pulled downstream, and then an empty aluminum Jon boat floated by. By midnight, 10 inches of thick, tobacco-colored water had streamed into the home. Elijah called 9-1-1. Between 2:30 and 3:00 a.m., a troop of local men arrived in an inflatable grey raft to rescue the couple. The rain was black and cold.

Leona, who mostly uses a wheelchair, looked at the raft bobbing in the flood, and then at her husband. She refused to get into the unsteady vessel, afraid the men would lose their grip on her and her chair, and that she would fall into the water rising swiftly around them. Elijah thought these men, strangers to the couple, looked weary. Sometime later, the men left, steering the raft and its line of light back up to higher ground.

Before dawn broke, three feet of water had streamed into the home. Clothes, trinkets and furniture floated past Leona’s knees. She felt like an island in a giant lake. Both she and Elijah thought they might die.

“We hoped it might quit raining, and then it did. The water just went down,” Leona said a few weeks later. “It’s the only thing that saved us.”

Severe floods like these aren’t new to Kentucky. According to the Division of Water’s Kentucky Flood Risk Assessment, flooding is the most expensive and most common natural disaster in the state. Earlier this year, Ohio Valley ReSource reported that 230,000 homes in the Ohio Valley are at risk of flood damage, including five percent of Kentucky homes. Flooding costs the Commonwealth about $40 million annually. And while eastern Kentucky’s topography — steep ridgelines, narrow valleys and abundant waterways — means regional flooding is a part of life, as the floods become more extreme, the recovery times between them are shrinking.

Ivy Brashear, 35, is the Appalachian transition director for the Berea-based nonprofit Mountain Association. A native of Eastern Kentucky, she says people frame communities as gritty, resilient, able to survive just about anything.

“That’s true,” she says, “but it’s also true that it’s just incredibly exhausting for people to always be in crisis mode and always be thinking about and worrying about the next weather event that’s going to happen.”

And, like coastal areas disappearing under climatic flooding, it’s a region with a historic connection to place — the “native topography is in [the] blood and bones” of those who grew up there, as Kentucky author Silas House wrote in an essay about 2020 flooding. Many do not want to leave the region; others, who’ve seen their homes flooded numerous times, may not have the economic means to start over somewhere new.

All told, Kentuckians were impacted across at least 31 counties, all of which made local disaster declarations after flood waters reached record levels from late February to early March. On April 23, President Biden issued a major disaster declaration to help in the recovery from flooding, landslides, mudslides and other severe storm damage.

Unfortunately, the economic aftershocks have continued into the summer. By early June, the need for recovery assistance remained so high, additional FEMA staff were deployed to assist in applications for general disaster aid before a June 23 deadline. On the same day, four months after the floods, disaster food benefits were granted to nine of eastern Kentucky’s hardest hit counties: Breathitt, Clay, Estill, Floyd, Johnson, Lee, Magoffin, Martin and Powell.

A few weeks after the waters rose, I called and visited over a dozen residents in five impacted counties between the ages of 21 and 72, who experienced what they, and Kentucky’s governor, called the worst flooding they’d seen in their lifetimes. While climate change means these disasters are going to happen more often, and get worse, civic leaders and community members are seeking tangible, long-term solutions like infrastructure investments, land reclamation and insurance programs that cover flooding and mudslides, while advocating for the sustainability of the land they call home.

MARTIN COUNTY, KY

Across the street from the Stepps, Lola Slone and her fiance, Paul Walsh, also called 9-1-1 on February 29. Local law enforcement arrived in a raised Jeep, and Slone scooped Lucky, her black yorkie-poodle puppy, under her arm. They stayed at the Martin County Senior Citizens Center, but there were no beds, so Slone and Walsh sat in chairs all night.

Slone had bought her house just two months earlier for $42,000. She says her agent told her the place rarely flooded, and that even when it did, only the road was affected, so Slone did not buy flood insurance. Slightly raised, the home was largely spared by the latest flood, though water entered Slone’s crawlspace, coming within a few inches of the baseboards. The flood totaled her 2015 Buick, and now her furnace makes a disquieting popping sound, and a musky smell rises out of her carpets.

Over 17 of the last 21 years, there has been at least one, though often two or three, federally declared flooding disasters in Kentucky. According to the 2018 Flood Risk Assessment, these events will only increase in frequency and severity over time. Between 1996 and 2016, Kentucky averaged almost four flood-related deaths per year, for a total of 77 residents who died during floods.

The assessment states the biggest preventative investment for flooding is in “direly needed” updates to climatic science, including the datasets that forecast floods, which the assessment said could be “inaccurate” as the climate crisis impacts the severity and frequency of rain events. But until that occurs, mitigation measures could reduce hazards by updating infrastructure like roads, bridges, levees, and dams; relocating vulnerable populations; and promoting homeowner purchase of flood insurance.

Ruby Muncie, 72, owns what residents say is the only home on New Berry Lane with flood insurance. I met her son-in-law, Earl Cook, on the porch of her home after it was gutted: the living room was stripped to studs, the kitchen cabinets were ripped out, the floors were barren. The bathroom was empty of baths and the bedrooms of beds. Hints that someone lived here and took pride in decorating their home were few but jarring: plastic ivy left above a window, glass chimes on the front porch ringing like rainwater.

“The couch, the chair, all that stuff went on down the creek,” Muncie said over a landline from Cook’s house, where she was staying with her daughter. When the creek lapped at her front steps, Muncie practiced a familiar routine: she moved family photographs to a high shelf and retreated to Inez Nazarene Church just up the road.

Muncie bought the home in 1972 and raised two daughters here, but she considers moving every time the water comes up. Two other record floods ruined her home in 1977 and 2004. Muncie wouldn’t share what she pays for flood insurance, but she said the annual cost was a “high amount.” She can afford it after a career as a caseworker specialist, issuing social services like food stamps. But what she can’t afford is relocation. If a buyout was offered, Muncie said, she’d probably take it.

“I’m tired of worrying about the water,” she said. “I’m tired of watching everything I’ve worked for wash down the river.”

A few miles away, Dwayne Mills built the home he shares with his wife and four kids in the Martin County floodplain, but lifted it to stay out of the flood zone. He spends $600 annually on flood insurance. Mills, a former pastor, directs Appalachian Reach Out, a non-profit that helps with disaster relief. In March, he brought in work teams from nine states, distributing over 200,000 pounds of food, 100,000 water bottles and 3,300 labor hours.

But Mills, who lives on a comfortable salary, said flood insurance is particularly difficult to afford for many in the county who live paycheck to paycheck. According to the 2010 census, 39 percent of Martin County is impoverished, but Mills says anecdotally, poverty impacts 70 to 80 percent of kids in the county.

Unlike car or homeowners’ insurance, which is a monthly cost, flood insurance is paid annually through FEMA, and the amount is set by FEMA. Jared Goforth, a 27-year-old county commissioner, was stranded in a log cabin at the top of a holler after his road flooded for three days. When he finally got out, he started going door to door, processing FEMA damage assessments. Out of roughly 60 assessments made by late March, Goforth says only three to five of the homeowners he spoke to had flood insurance, with most telling him the annual cost was too high. The county, once a thriving coal town, is expected to see mining cease over the next year, and coal severance taxes that once funded the community, bottom out. Goforth says the population, a little over 11,000, is declining. His own siblings moved to Ohio to work in factories, hospitals and mechanic shops.

“It’s a pattern because a lot of the same houses get flooded [year after year],” Goforth says. “But I guess they like it there, or they might not have the means to relocate.”

He and other commissioners compiled as many reports of damage as possible to help their county meet a “threshold” for FEMA assistance. Otherwise, the county, infamous for troubled infrastructure, including decades of lacking access to clean drinking water, would again be on its own.

LEE COUNTY, KY

The water line at William Campbell’s barber shop along Main Street in Beattyville, Kentucky was over my head, hitting the signed photograph of University of Kentucky basketball player Richie Farmer.

“I’m fortunate compared to most people in the community,” says Campbell, 45, who grew up on the county line between Lee and Wolfe. Campbell’s son brought him down in a Jon boat on March 1, but the water was so high it almost touched the top of the doorway, and he had to wait for the floodwaters to recede to see the damage. He reopened just a week later, but the barbershop was largely in disarray, with exposed wall boards and piles of trash. Campbell kept busy, sweeping the ever-present dust and practicing his casting in the empty parking lot next door until a regular walked up, removing his cap so Campbell could trim his white hair.

Campbell’s a renter, so he doesn’t have flood insurance. His landlord, who lives behind the shop, had five feet of water crest into their home. Campbell says they cancelled their flood insurance on the building two years prior.

Virtually all the buildings along Beattyville’s historic Main Street flooded, and many were gutted with ongoing repairs when I visited in early April. Where Main Street meets the Kentucky River, Father John Lijana took me inside his All Saints Catholic Church, pointing out where floodwaters pushed over pews, warping the wood and destroying electrical equipment. It’s an old building, and before the flood, Lijana was slowly using his strict parish budget to replace heat pumps and AC units, finish floors and add furniture.

A sign in downtown Beattyville, Kentucky earlier this year.

But by 7:30 a.m. on March 1, the North Fork of the Kentucky River had reached Lijana’s front door. He abandoned his parsonage, scaled a wet hillside and followed train tracks to the Travelwise Motel under the static light of dawn.

“I was making progress,” Lijana told me. “But everything I did for the last three years is for nothing it seems.”

In between the barbershop and the church, Alexis Townsend, 21, had just re-opened a Mexican restaurant called Los Two Brothers where over a foot of floodwater floated tables and turned heavy equipment upside down. Townsend says repairing the walls and floor cost $14,300; new food orders and equipment totaled almost $14,000 more.

Until funding arrives from the federal disaster declaration, immediate relief for individuals and businesses has come from the Appalachian Impact Fund out of Perry County. Executive Director Lora Smith set up the Southeast Kentucky Flood Relief Fund on Monday, March 1, the same day Campbell and Townsend were wading into their flooded properties. By Friday, she was issuing emergency relief grants to impacted families in the form of $500 checks. Three days later, partners like App Rising, AppHarvest, and Appalachians for Appalachia had partnered with local news stations to launch a telethon raising over $1 million.

Before the end of the month, Smith funded 1,300 paper and online applications, granting $600,000 in immediate relief to individuals. Smith subsequently launched small business grants up to $5,000 which provided $412,797 to 104 local businesses; a small farm fund closed after allocating a quarter of a million dollars to 202 farms in 27 counties. (The partnership launched quickly because it mimicked relief systems put into place during Covid-19, when over $1 million was distributed to 300 businesses, saving over 900 jobs.)

Prior to 2021, Beattyville locals gabbed about two other floods: 1957 and 1984. Don Begley, owner of a car dealership on Main Street, pulled down old newspaper clippings of flood waters collected throughout the decades that he keeps pinned to a giant bulletin board outside his office.

Newspaper clippings of historic flooding in Beattyville.

“That’s me,” he said, pointing to a man in a hooded raincoat dragging a boat through downtown. His son, Allen Begley, previously had flood insurance required by his mortgage because he was in the flood zone. But when he paid the building off, he dropped the insurance. Begley said he’s not sure if he regrets it, but the 2021 flood hasn’t convinced him to pick up the extra expense.

“With the [Kentucky] river it’s a love-hate relationship,” Begley said. “It’s on our banners, and on our tourism we advertise that we’re the birthplace of the Kentucky River. We love it and promote it, but at the same time it floods us out.”

Belgey serves as chair of the Downtown Beattyville Alliance, and he said while recent discussions with community leaders haven’t included climate change, they’re worried about these floods happening every few years instead of every couple decades. Beattyville’s Main Street manager, Teresa Mays, agreed, saying they want to continue bringing in visitors by advertising the landscape, but that local leadership was ready to consider mitigation tactics like a flood wall.

“Putting up a flood wall changes the whole appearance, but we have businesses down here that are going to spend upwards of $230,000 to fix their buildings,” Mays said. In the early aughts, Lee County spent almost $3 million over a decade to revitalize its downtown, increasing walkability and attracting more tourists from the nearby Red River Gorge Geological Area.

“We can continue to build back, but [places like] Beattyville will be underwater again,” said Lora Smith, of Appalachian Impact Fund. “So we need forward-thinking solutions.”

PERRY COUNTY, KY

Before Randy Baker heard the trees on the hillside crack open and tumble down, he smelled the pine sap through the rain. Around 2:00 a.m. on March 1, an unprecedented mudslide tore down the ridgeline toward his one-story home. Baker woke his wife, Linda, and together they hustled their two kids down the gravel driveway to his mother’s house. In the morning, broken limbs and dirt piles blocked their back deck and kitchen door.

Linda and Randy Baker's home was damaged by a mudslide after intense rainfall this year. An abandoned coal mine is above their land in Busy, a small town near Hazard.

The Bakers live along a holler just outside Hazard in the tiny town of Busy. When the rains stopped on March 1, friends brought over heavy machinery to remove some of the mud, cut down a dozen trees, and temporarily arrest the slip. A week later, a contractor quoted $192,000 to fix the slide, at least $56,000 more than the house is worth. Another contractor suggested a band-aid solution of $30,000 to divert the water causing the slide.

Balking at the first estimate, the Bakers tried to get a home equity loan to cover the $30,000 band-aid, but Linda said their bank worried it would be a waste of money; with the slide still active, they still stand to lose the entire house.

“You’re afraid to go to sleep,” Linda said over the phone. “You have trees that look like they’re going to harpoon right into the house.”

Linda, a legal secretary in a law office, easily found the mudslide’s source: an abandoned coal mine perched 150 yards above the home they bought in October 2018. In Eastern Kentucky, abandoned mines without reclamation can fill with water and cause deluges. So the Baker’s called Abandoned Mine Lands (AML), an office of Kentucky’s Energy and Environment Cabinet meant to protect public health and safety from mines abandoned prior to 1982. Assessors came to their property twice in March, once flying a drone over the landscape. But on March 19 the Bakers received a letter of denial, stating one source could not be defined as a mined coal bed, and another source was mined after the 1982 cutoff.

The letter, after the high contracting quotes, was gutting. The Bakers didn’t have flood insurance, because their home is on a hillside 200 feet above the north fork of the Kentucky River, and not at risk of riverine flooding. Flood insurance doesn’t cover mudslides. Nor does their homeowners insurance, which denied covering the slide because their insurance agent called it an “act of God.” While the couple could appeal the AML letter, it could take three to five years and a heavy set of legal fees.

Meanwhile, Linda’s son, 15, texts her from school or calls from his dad’s house, asking about the slide and worried over whether he’ll be homeless. When I visit, he’s banging on a drum set inside. Three weeks after the initial slide, more heavy rainfall caused the mud to slide again; the kids now keep a bag packed by the front door, in case of an emergency. Important documents and photographs are stored at the far end of the house, where contractors told the couple they faced less risk of damage. The section likely to slide again is six feet from the couple’s bedroom.

Ivy Brashear of Mountain Association said there weren’t a lot of mudslides when she was growing up in Perry County. She said they’ve been exacerbated by surface mining without the accompanying — and legally required — reforestation and land remediation.

“[Kentucky’s climate change] is not going to be losing land to the ocean on the coastlines, but extreme storms and flooding and mudslides exacerbated by surface mining,” Brashear said. “It’s all wrapped up together.”

The last person the Bakers have turned to for help is U.S. Representative Hal Rogers, a Republican serving his 20th term in Kentucky’s 5th Congressional District. Linda contacted the Somerset office that handles AML cases. She received a letter from Rogers’ office on March 22 stating he was making inquiries on their behalf. As of mid-May, Linda had not heard back. She’s religious, so aside from badgering Rogers’ office, she prays. Right now, she says it’s about all she can do.

“Folks just can’t leave, and most of the time they don’t want to. There’s nothing wrong with that,” Brashear says. “The issue is there isn’t enough being done currently to make sure these events are happening less than they are right now, and when they do happen, to make sure there’s some relief on the other side of it.”

The North Fork Kentucky River in Hazard.