This coverage is made possible through a partnership between BPR and Grist, a nonprofit environmental media organization.
When her hometown of Pikeville, Ky. flooded, Cara Ellis immediately jumped into action.
“I’ve been here, there, everywhere in the county," she said. Ellis has helped friends evacuate and delivered essential supplies to people who have lost their homes.
“It’s overwhelming, there’s a lot of devastation,” Ellis said, speaking during a brief break at home in the midst of the chaos.
The Levisa Fork of the Big Sandy River drowned houses and parts of downtown, prompting more than 100 rescues in the county alone and cutting water for multiple neighborhoods and small communities. It’s a record flood for her town, but it’s not the first time she’s seen disaster strike her region, and she fears it won’t be the last.
“We know there’s going to be a next time,” she said. “It’s just what are we gonna do next time to be more prepared, and what does that look like?”
This isn’t the first Appalachian flood, and experts are saying they’ll only get more common in the future. It’s becoming a more and more familiar sight: creeks and rivers rising to waterlogged towns after a heavy rain, followed by weeks, months, years of arduous mucking and gutting and figuring out next steps.
Across Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia, and Tennessee, more than 8 inches of heavy rain over the weekend combined with already-sodden and thawing ground to cause widespread, deadly flooding.
In Kentucky, landslides blocked roads and destroyed houses in areas that only recently recovered from floods that devastated the region in 2022.
Fifteen people were killed in the storm in Kentucky including three in Pike County. In West Virginia, two died in the storm.
These floods are the latest in an increasingly severe pattern across the region with three once-rare historic flood events in under three years.
This recent flooding comes just five months after Hurricane Helene, which devastated Western North Carolina, southern Virginia and east Tennessee.
Close two years ago, devastating flooding in eastern Kentucky killed 45 people and caused damage across 13 counties. Even now, communities in West Virginia are also still recovering from a historic flood in 2016.
Nicolas Pierre Zegre is a forest hydrologist at West Virginia University who studies flood adaptation in the region.
He said the severity and timescale of flooding has accelerated as climate change causes more extreme precipitation, which in turn interacts with the mountainous slopes and narrow valleys to cause deadly flash flooding. The problem transcends state lines across the Appalachian mountain region.
“These unprecedented storms really do represent our new reality,” Zegre said. “Acknowledging that things have been changing kind of opens up the door on other conversations, like why are things changing?”
Zegre said some communities base development plans on outdated flood maps and risk assessments. He said he would like to see municipal planning incorporate household-level disaster preparedness – such as access to food and water in the immediate aftermath of a disaster.
“In Appalachia, we all need to be our own first responders because these things are happening really really fast,” Zegre said.
As Ellis helps friends and family, she says the floods have helped her appreciate the solidarity that comes from repeated experiences with disaster across the region. She said Helene survivors from North Carolina have already shown up to support her community.
“They were the first people to reach out to us, and those are people that are still in recovery,” she said.
On Tuesday, Beloved Asheville, a mutual aid organization, drove a supply truck to Perry County, Ky., where some communities were underwater over the weekend. The city of Asheville also mobilized its swiftwater rescue team to help pull survivors from their homes in the city of Hazard.
Chelsea White-Hoglen, a community organizer in Haywood County, helped coordinate supply runs through local mutual aid networks to fill immediate needs in Eastern Kentucky. Eastern Kentucky flood survivors helped her during Helene.
“From the very jump, our friends in central Appalachia who had the experience of going through this during 2022 were ready to be activated because they knew what we were going through,” White-Hoglen said.
Living in Western North Carolina, she said, there is a familiarity with the way roads and communities might become cut off or inaccessible due to fallen trees or landslides.
“These networks, human-to-human relationships, are going to be the strongest and most reliable when we confront these kinds of catastrophes,” White-Hoglen said.
She said she knows from talking to Helene survivors that while federal assistance may be coming, post-flood needs – food, water, baby supplies, heat – need to be met immediately, and the flexibility of rapid response from neighbors can save lives.
