THIS ARTICLE IS republished from The Dialog below a Artistic Commons license.
On Valentine’s Day 2025, heavy rains began to fall in components of rural Appalachia. Over the course of some days, residents in jap Kentucky watched as river ranges rose and surpassed flood ranges. Emergency groups carried out over 1,000 water rescues. Tons of, if not hundreds of individuals had been displaced from houses, and whole enterprise districts stuffed with mud.
For some, it was the third time in simply 4 years that their houses had flooded, and the method of disposing of destroyed furnishings, cleansing out the muck, and beginning anew is starting once more.
Floods worn out companies and houses in jap Kentucky in February 2021, July 2022, and now February 2025. An excellent better scale of destruction hit jap Tennessee and western North Carolina in September 2024, when Hurricane Helene’s rainfall and flooding decimated cities and washed out components of main highways.
Every of those occasions was thought of to be a “thousand-year flood,” with a 1-in-1,000 probability of occurring in a given yr. But they’re occurring extra typically.
The floods have highlighted the resilience of native individuals to work collectively for collective survival in rural Appalachia. However they’ve additionally uncovered the deep vulnerability of communities, a lot of that are positioned alongside creeks on the base of hills and mountains with poor emergency warning techniques. As short-term cleanup results in long-term restoration efforts, residents can face daunting boundaries that go away many going through the identical flood dangers time and again.
Exposing a Housing Disaster
For the previous 9 years, I’ve been conducting analysis on rural well being and poverty in Appalachia. It’s a fancy area typically painted in broad brushstrokes that miss the geographic, socioeconomic, and ideological variety it holds.
Appalachia is dwelling to a vibrant tradition, a fierce sense of pleasure, and a robust sense of affection. However additionally it is marked by the omnipresent backdrop of a declining coal trade.
There may be appreciable native inequality that’s typically missed in a area portrayed as one-dimensional. Poverty ranges are certainly excessive. In Perry County, Kentucky, the place one among jap Kentucky’s bigger cities, Hazard, is positioned, almost 30 p.c of the inhabitants lives below the federal poverty line. However the common earnings of the highest 1 p.c of employees in Perry County is almost $470,000—17 occasions greater than the typical earnings of the remaining 99 p.c.