Eastern Kentucky, one of the poorest areas of the USA, has been devastated by the worst floods in the history of the region, the result of climate change and the wreckage of watersheds by strip mining.
Tarance Ray, one of the Trillbillies, wrote an article about it in The Baffler.
Will anything meaningful be done to help the flood victims? Or prevent future floods? he asked. Not likely, he answered; not by the present powers that be.
When several complexes of “training thunderstorms” established themselves over Eastern Kentucky on July 25, pounding the Kentucky River watershed with upwards of fourteen inches of rain over the next five days, the conditions were ripe for a catastrophically fatal outcome.
First of all, the Kentucky River watershed had been subjected to many decades of strip mining, which decreases the soil’s ability to retain water. So, when the rains came, the water was funneled into creeks—and peoples’ homes.
There’s a reason Knott County has had the highest number of flooding fatalities: its narrow valleys created virtual traps in the face of rushing water, pinning people to the ground at the exact moment they needed to be anywhere but.
Whitesburg, Kentucky
The … [town of] Neon is the best example of what this looks like. Just a few miles upstream from it is an old strip mine. When the water came through that area, it ran through the community like a stampede of bulls. Neon is now a wasteland of twisted metal. There are cars in houses, houses on top of houses, an entire building unmoored from its foundation. City Hall has had to set up in a muddy parking lot under a pop-up tent and a camper van.
Even further upstream from Neon, in a community called McRoberts, I saw something I’d never seen before: two cars freestanding end-to-end on a bridge rail, completely mangled and disassembled but perfectly preserved in their disassemblage, like they’d been pinned to something larger while the water stripped them apart, piece by piece. It now remains like a statue, a testament to the power of deluge. [snip]
More than twenty-three thousand lost electricity. Roads and bridges have collapsed, leaving entire communities inaccessible. Others, like Neon, are without running water and waste disposal, and it may be months before this can be fixed.
While President Joe Biden declared the flood a major disaster on July 29, it was another two days before the state’s first FEMA mobile registration center opened to help residents access relief; additional centers did not reach Knott, Breathitt, and other counties until August 2.
You can easily talk yourself out of criticizing this delay until you concede that, yes, OK, we do live in the wealthiest, most technologically advanced society in human history, so surely something else must be going on here.
Phil Ebersole's Blog 