HAZARD, Ky. – Shirley Stamper, 74, woke up to the sound of wild banging under his house. Floodwaters were engulfing her isolated mountain community and Ms Stamper, along with her mother-in-law, Ethel Stamper, 94, had to get out immediately.
Shortly after, as the waters around them rose rapidly, Ms Stamper found herself barefoot in the mud, scantily clad, as rescuers from a National Guard helicopter urged her to climb to edge. She turned to her mother-in-law.
“I said, ‘Ethel, are you getting in that helicopter? “She said, ‘Yes, I am.'”
Rain continued to fall in parts of eastern Kentucky on Friday, and streams and rivers were still swelling. But where the floodwaters receded, the destruction of the last two days slowly but terribly appeared. At least 25 people have died, according to reports from the governor’s office and local officials.
Governor Andy Beshear has repeatedly said the toll will almost certainly rise.
In the rugged topography of central Appalachia, many places were still cut off Friday, and determining the toll of the devastation could take weeks. There was more rain forecast for early next week, adding even more urgency to rescue efforts. “We need to act quickly after the water recedes tomorrow,” Mr Beshear said, “certainly before it rains again.”
In Breathitt County, Jeffrey Noble, the executive judge, said the storm and flooding knocked out phones for miles around. Even in the county seat of Jackson, he said, major roads and thoroughfares were still blocked.
“They say around 250 people are missing,” he said. “I don’t even want to talk about the dead. I heard two different numbers, and I hope they are both wrong.
He was shaken by the stories he had heard from people in the county as well as the things he had seen first hand, including a truck he had observed as it was slowly overtaken by water. in the middle of the night.
“Homes are washed away, communities are washed away, roads are washed away,” Mr Noble said. “I’ve heard of century-old floods, but it’s way beyond that. In the history of Kentucky, our county has never seen anything like it.
On Friday, the death toll rose throughout the day. Perry County Emergency Management Director Jerry Stacy said the number of victims in the county increased from one to four victims by evening. Breathitt County Coroner Hargis Epperson said at least three people in the county were confirmed dead in the flooding, with at least a dozen missing. And Knott County Coroner Corey Watson, who worked in a large garage at a local funeral home, said Friday he had confirmed 14 deaths, down from 11 that morning.
“There are still people missing,” Mr Watson added.
What we knew on Friday was already heartbreaking. Among the dead were at least six children, four of them from the same family.
Riley Noble Jr., 6, and Nevaeh Noble, 4, were found on Thursday, and on Friday their siblings, Maddison Noble, 8, and Chance Noble, 1, were discovered, all under 50 meters apart, a parent, Brittany Trejo, said.
When their parents received a flash food alert at 2 a.m. on Thursday, the family had just minutes to escape, Ms Trejo said, recounting what her cousin Amber Smith, the parents’ mother, told her. children aged 23.
Within minutes that Mrs Smith was able to dress the children, water had already started pouring into their mobile home. The family climbed onto the top of the caravan in the dark to wait out the flooding, Ms Trejo said, “but they were only there for a very short time before realizing their home was about to be swept away”.
Holding hands with older children and hugging younger ones, the family “floated” from the top of their trailer to a nearby tree, she said. There they stood together, watching their house float and crying out for help. However, the water rose higher. And “one by one,” Ms Trejo said, the four children were carried away from the tree by the current. “The water rage took their children out of their hands,” Ms Trejo said. After about eight hours of clinging to the tree to stay alive, the parents were rescued by a stranger in a kayak.
“They were such loving, caring and well-behaved young children,” Ms Trejo said. “They liked the things that all kids enjoy.”
Beshear told reporters that the National Guard, state police and other state agencies were assisting in search and rescue efforts, which included about 50 air rescues and hundreds of boat rescues. Nearly 300 people were rescued across the state, he said, of whom about 100 were airlifted to safety.
Many of those who had survived the floods were then put at risk by the isolation that followed. Roads were washed away or buried in mudslides, stranding residents, many of whom were elderly and in poor health, in flood-ravaged valleys without water or electricity. According to PowerOutage.us, which aggregates utility data, about 20,000 customers were without power in Kentucky’s hardest-hit counties as of Friday night.
In the mountains of central Appalachia, flooding can be terrifying and sudden, with water rushing down barren, demined hillsides or pouring out during summer thunderstorms. Families living along creeks in hollows often have little warning and few escape routes, which is why flooding in the area has been so deadly in the past. But Thursday’s flooding was the worst in local memory.
“I’ve spoken to several people over the past couple of days who were in their 70s, 80s and none of them remember anything like that,” said Jeff Hawkins, who has lived in a hollow for 52 years. Letcher County which is now bordered with flooded buildings and half-submerged trucks.
The relative remoteness of many towns from central Appalachia is a challenge at times like this, but it also fosters a special kind of self-reliance. As the waters rose on Thursday, neighbors set off into the floodwaters in their boats to find people in need of rescue.
After the worst was over on Thursday morning, Jamie and Julie Hatton walked out of their home in Whitesburg to find a town that in many parts was still submerged. They set out to rescue a friend in a kayak, only to hear others were stranded when they came to the edge of the floodwaters.
The kayaks turned out to be no match for the swift current, Ms Hatton said, and soon people were showing up in their motorboats. Mr Hatton, who is the Letcher County attorney, estimated he spent around six hours assisting with water rescues on Thursday.
“At that time it was very desperate,” Ms Hatton said.
The focus on Friday was on the cost to life, but the floodwaters also damaged irreplaceable deposits of eastern Kentucky culture. Rising waters in Whitesburg, a cultural center in this part of Appalachia, engulfed buildings belonging to Appalshop, a 53-year-old arts and education center, flooding the radio studio and exhibition space and sending pieces of archival material to Main Rue.
In the small Knott County town of Hindman, the Appalachian School of Luthiery, where artisans learn the art of building dulcimers and other stringed instruments, has been ruined, said Christy Boyd, director of the development at the Appalachian Artisan Center.
“There aren’t a lot of dulcimer people anymore,” Ms Boyd said. “So when you lose something, it’s not just monetary; it cannot be replaced because no one does. A similar observation could be made about many small towns in central Appalachia, which had been slowly dying for decades before being drowned in a flash flood. “We have next to nothing, and losing what you have,” she said, trailing off.
At a hotel in Letcher County, Jeannie Adams reunited with her family and in-laws, not knowing what the days ahead might bring. The morning before, she and her son had been wading from their porch into deeper and deeper water.
“I was scared,” she said. “And I said, ‘Let’s go back.’ But there was no turning back The current of water separated us And as a mother it was. …”
She stopped to collect herself. “It was terrifying,” she said.
Along an overgrown embankment, where railway tracks once ran, they made their way out of the flooded hollow to safety. But they lost their house and almost everything. “There are so many of us who have lost everything but the shirt on our backs,” Ms Adams said. “And we need help. Desperately, some of us desperately need help.
Maham Javaid, Shawn Huber, Jesus Jiménez and Serge F. Kovaleski contributed report.
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