Appalachians Are Trapped in a Disastrous Cycle of Flooding and Rebuilding

THIS ARTICLE IS republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

On Valentine’s Day 2025, dense rains started to fall successful parts of agrarian Appalachia. Over the people of a fewer days, residents successful eastbound Kentucky watched arsenic stream levels roseate and surpassed flood levels. Emergency teams conducted over 1,000 h2o rescues. Hundreds, if not thousands of radical were displaced from homes, and full concern districts filled with mud.

For some, it was the 3rd clip successful conscionable 4 years that their homes had flooded, and the process of disposing of destroyed furniture, cleaning retired the muck, and starting anew is opening again.

Floods wiped retired businesses and homes successful eastbound Kentucky successful February 2021, July 2022, and present February 2025. An adjacent greater standard of demolition deed eastbound Tennessee and occidental North Carolina successful September 2024, erstwhile Hurricane Helene’s rainfall and flooding decimated towns and washed retired parts of major highways.

Each of these events was considered to beryllium a “thousand-year flood,” with a 1-in-1,000 accidental of happening successful a fixed year. Yet they’re happening much often.

The floods person highlighted the resilience of section people to enactment unneurotic for corporate endurance successful agrarian Appalachia. But they person besides exposed the deep vulnerability of communities, galore of which are located on creeks astatine the basal of hills and mountains with mediocre exigency informing systems. As short-term cleanup leads to semipermanent betterment efforts, residents tin look daunting barriers that permission galore facing the aforesaid flood risks implicit and implicit again.

Exposing a Housing Crisis

For the past 9 years, I person been conducting probe connected agrarian wellness and poorness successful Appalachia. It’s a analyzable portion often painted successful wide brushstrokes that miss the geographic, socioeconomic, and ideological diverseness it holds.

Appalachia is home to a vibrant culture, a fierce consciousness of pride, and a beardown consciousness of love. But it is besides marked by the omnipresent backdrop of a declining ember industry.

There is sizeable section inequality that is often overlooked successful a portion portrayed arsenic one-dimensional. Poverty levels are so high. In Perry County, Kentucky, wherever 1 of eastbound Kentucky’s larger cities, Hazard, is located, nearly 30 percent of the colonisation lives nether the national poorness line. But the average income of the apical 1 percent of workers successful Perry County is astir $470,000—17 times much than the mean income of the remaining 99 percent.