By: Richard Huang
Beginning on July 24th, 2022, the catastrophic flooding in Kentucky continues to demolish everything on its way, causing the citizens to realize the difficulties for reconstruction.
In eastern Kentucky, Firefighters and the National Guards are rushing to rescue hundreds of people who are trapped in the dangerous water. The government is trying to save lives using every possible way, but it still cannot prevent further destruction of buildings.
“I wish I could tell you why we keep getting hit here in Kentucky,” Gov. Andy Beshear said during a briefing in which he announced the severe situation and provided data of the death toll.
“I wish I could tell you why areas where people may not have much continue to get hit and lose everything,” he went on. “I can’t give you the why, but I know what we do in response to it. And the answer is everything we can.”
This disaster will draw many setbacks for affected communities, especially the rural areas which are extremely vulnerable to flooding.
“These places were not thriving before,” said Jason Bailey, the executive director of the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy. “To even get back to where they were is a long road.”
Furthermore, some of the citizens have not yet recovered from a previous powerful ice storm, a flash flood, and a destructive tornado that went on a 200-mile path and killed 80 people. The surprising flood adds even more devastation and damage to the families that were affected by earlier disasters.
“We had another flood, a record flood, not 12 months ago, and a lot of families had just started getting their lives back on track,” said Hargis Epperson, the coroner of Breathitt County, which roughly has a dozen people missing because of the flood. “Now it’s happened all over again, worse this time. Everybody’s lost everything, twice.”
“The pure catastrophic loss is hard to put into words,” said Dan Mosley, the judge-executive for Harlan County, which fortunately only experienced minor flooding. “I’ve just never seen anything like this in my career or even my life.”
The cause of this severe disaster, however, may be the result of climate change. As heavier rainfalls and flash floods occur more often and more destructive, Kentucky may face a similar but worse situation next year. Like the Texas power outage last year, it proves that climate change has caused the weather to be more unpredictable and erratic.
Without outside aids, “this would be unsurvivable,” said Judge Mosley, who is also an officer in the Kentucky Association of Counties. “The federal government’s resources and our faith in God is the only thing that’s going to get us through this.”
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/30/us/kentucky-flooding-natural-disasters.html