Flooding continues to occur in Floyd County, and the federal government continues to return to the rescue.
In July 2022, a minimum of 40 people died and 300 homes were damaged when the eastern Kentucky county flooded. It was the thirteenth time in 12 years that the agricultural county was declared a disaster. These disasters are so costly that local governments feel they can’t cover all the prices, so the governor is asking the president to declare a disaster to release federal funds.
“After the flood, 500 homeless people looked at me and said, 'Judge, what should we do?'” recalls Judge Robbie Williams, administrator of the district of just over 35,000 residents. “It's overwhelming, and it's only a matter of time before something like this happens again.”
That's right. In 2023, Floyd County was declared a disaster for the 14th time since 2011. And Floyd County isn't even probably the most disaster-prone county within the country. In neighboring Johnson County, 15 disasters have been declared by the Federal Emergency Management Agency since 2011.
When it involves extreme weather and other so-called natural disasters, people generally look to hurricane- or earthquake-prone coasts and think that's where the danger lies. But in line with an atlas of 713 FEMA-declared disasters created by Rebuild by Design and New York University, that's not where most disasters are declared by the federal government. While most individuals consider disasters as direct financial aid from the federal government to individual victims to pay for the lack of homes and businesses, the atlas focuses on the $60 billion pot of FEMA aid to governments.
Eight of the nine counties with probably the most federally declared disasters since 2011 – greater than a dozen each – are in Kentucky, and one is in Vermont. These counties have experienced 4 to 5 times as many disasters over the past 13 years because the national average of three.
“California and Louisiana, and I would say even Texas and Florida now, are sucking up all the oxygen when you hear about these huge storms,” said Atlas writer Amy Chester, director of the disaster preparedness nonprofit group Rebuild By Design. “But what you don't hear about are these storms that are happening all the time and are starting to become the norm in places like Vermont.” Chester also mentioned Tennessee, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Iowa and Alaska as hotspots.
“We want to show that climate change is already here,” Chester said of the info, which covers 2011 to 2023 but doesn’t take note of heat waves, drought or COVID. “Communities everywhere are suffering.”
Before she analyzed the info, Chester said she thought Vermont was a climate change paradise. Cooler. Inland. Instead, it's a disaster hotspot.
“It's terrible,” Chester said. “It just keeps happening to them.”
A couple of days later, she said Vermont had experienced more flooding, this time from the remnants of Hurricane Beryl.
Flooding is probably the most common disaster within the United States, in line with FEMA. Since 2011, FEMA has paid out greater than $41 billion in hurricane relief funds, greater than every other form of disaster.
“The data tells us that the frequency and severity of disasters is increasing at the local and state level, affecting rural, suburban and urban areas across the country,” Susan Cutter, co-director of the Hazards Vulnerability and Resilience Institute on the University of South Carolina, said in an email. She was not involved in Chester's research. “More needs to be done to increase resilience and reduce impacts on people.”
The largest county within the country that has not been declared a federal disaster since 2011 is Mecklenburg County in North Carolina, where the town of Charlotte is situated.
“We were lucky,” said Charlotte Emergency Management Chief Robert Graham, who attributes the dearth of federal disasters to luck, good government and favorable geographic conditions.
“We're somewhat protected from the coast,” Graham said of the inland county. “We don't get all the impacts of the mountains. Charlotte seems to be in a kind of ideal location.”
Graham said a well-stocked reserve fund and planning have prevented the town from having to hunt financial help from the federal government after disasters just like the 2019 flood, but he also knows it's only a matter of time before the town's luck runs out.
Luck gave up on Eastern Kentucky a protracted time ago.
Life in Floyd County is difficult due to geography and government regulations, Williams said. In the mountainous county, people live in old coal camps within the narrow valley, he said. And when it rains, the increasingly shallow streams overflow their banks.
“We are experiencing flooding of historic proportions,” Williams said. “It's getting worse.”
Environmental regulations don’t allow local authorities to dredge the streams, that are stuffed with mud coming down from the mountains, often from construction projects, Williams said. Some streams were 20 feet deep a long time ago but are actually shallow enough to be crossed, he said.
The problem is the rain has nowhere to go,” Williams said.
Data from the National Weather Service shows that Floyd County now averages greater than 50 inches of rain per yr, up from 42 to 43 inches within the mid-Nineteen Eighties. Warmer air holds more moisture, and studies and statistics show that the Eastern United States shouldn’t be only getting more rain, but in addition more intense downpours that cause flooding.
Floyd County government has received greater than $35 million in disaster assistance from FEMA since 2011. And that's not even the utmost amount, with a lot of the money going to hurricane-ravaged areas.
Five counties, three of them in New York, received greater than $1 billion in FEMA assistance, led by Manhattan's New York County, which received $8.9 billion, just about all of it attributable to Hurricane Sandy in 2012. All five major counties were hit by a number of hurricanes.
Chester's group decided to take a look at congressional districts and the way they compared when it comes to disasters, especially on condition that the House of Representatives was nearly evenly divided.
Nearly 60 counties have had a minimum of 10 federally declared disasters since 2011, and nearly 70 percent of those counties are represented in Congress by Republicans. About 280 counties have had no disasters during that point period, and 87 percent of those counties are represented by Democrats, in line with NYU data.
Chester noted that Republicans will not be talking about climate change through the campaign, but added: “Research shows that extreme weather is not a partisan issue.”
More necessary is how state and native actions increase or minimize the chance of future disasters, says Samantha Montano, a professor of disaster management on the Massachusetts Maritime Academy. And in Floyd County, the federal government is using FEMA money to purchase the homes of 150 residents to get them out of harm's way, but some don't want to depart, Williams says.
“Until we get these homes out of the flood zone, we’re going to continue to have these problems,” Williams said.
Data journalist Mary Katherine Wildeman contributed from Hartford, Connecticut.
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