THIS ARTICLE IS republished from The Dialog underneath a Artistic Commons license.
On Valentine’s Day 2025, heavy rains began to fall in elements 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. A whole lot, if not hundreds of individuals have been displaced from properties, and whole enterprise districts crammed with mud.
For some, it was the third time in simply 4 years that their properties 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. A fair larger 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 elements 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 usually.
The floods have highlighted the resilience of native folks to work collectively for collective survival in rural Appalachia. However they’ve additionally uncovered the deep vulnerability of communities, a lot of that are situated alongside creeks on the base of hills and mountains with poor emergency warning methods. 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 over and over.
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 usually painted in broad brushstrokes that miss the geographic, socioeconomic, and ideological range it holds.
Appalachia is house 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 business.
There’s appreciable native inequality that’s usually neglected in a area portrayed as one-dimensional. Poverty ranges are certainly excessive. In Perry County, Kentucky, the place one in every of jap Kentucky’s bigger cities, Hazard, is situated, practically 30 p.c of the inhabitants lives underneath the federal poverty line. However the common revenue of the highest 1 p.c of employees in Perry County is sort of $470,000—17 instances greater than the typical revenue of the remaining 99 p.c.
