This is the article Published from Conversation Below Creative Commons Authorization.
On Valentine’s Day 2025, heavy rains were placed in parts of the rural Appalachia. During a few days, residents in the east of Kentucky watched the river surface and went beyond the flood surface. Emergency teams did more than 1,000 water rescue. Hundreds, if not thousands of homes were displaced and all commercial areas full of flowers.
For some, this was the third time in just four years that their homes had been flooded, and the process of removing furniture is destroyed, mock cleaning and starting again.
The flood of businesses and houses in the east of Kentucky in February 2021, July 2022 and now February 2025 destroyed. Even more demolition in September 2024, when Helen’s rain was washed and stormy floods and washed parts of large highways, in September 2024 east of Tennessee and North Carolina.
Each of these events was considered a “thousand -year -old flood”, with a probability of 1 in 1000 possibility in a given year. However, they are more likely to happen.
These floods have highlighted the resistance of the local people to cooperate with the collective survival in the village Apalachia. But they have also exposed the deep vulnerability of societies, many of which are along the streams at the base of the hills and mountains with poor emergency warning systems. Since short -term cleansing leads to long -term recovery efforts, residents can face frustrating obstacles, many of which are over and over again.
Disclosure of a housing crisis
Over the past nine years, I have done some research on rural health and poverty in Appalachia. It is a complex area that is often painted in wide brushes that loses geographical, economic and ideological diversity.
Appalachia is the home of a lively culture, a strong sense of pride and a strong feeling of love. But with the comprehensive background of the coal industry, the decline has been reduced.
There is a significant local inequality that is often ignored in an area portrayed as one -dimensional. The level of poverty is actually high. In the city of Perry, Kentucky, where one of Kentucky’s larger cities, danger, is about 30 percent of the federal poverty line. But the average of 1 % of the top 1 % of workers in the city of Perry is about 170,000 to 17 times more than the average revenue of 99 %.
