![]() She’s still feeding as many as 700 hungry people every week. As the water receded, she started serving hot meals in the town of Hindman a few nights each week, on her own dime. Kate Clemons, who runs a nonprofit meal service called Roscoe’s Daughter, sees this crisis every day. Yet there is a feeling among the survivors that no one’s at the rudder, and it’s everyone for themselves.Ī vacant building in Whitesbury, Kentucky, one year after floods devastated the Eastern part of the state. Multitudes of nonprofits, church and community organizations, businesses, and government agencies have spent months pitching in as best they can. Most people here live on less than $30,000 a year, and at the time of the disaster, no more than 5 percent had flood insurance. ![]() The need for help, specifically housing assistance, was, and remains, acute. That’s half the number the agency received. As of March about 8,000 applications for housing assistance had been approved. A lot of folks say that tally is low, based on the number of residents who sought help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Officially, the inundation destroyed nearly 600 homes and severely damaged 6,000 more. All told, 44 people died and some 22,000 people saw their homes damaged -staggering figures in a region where some counties have fewer than 20,000 residents. In the early hours of July 28, 2022, creeks and rivers across 13 counties in eastern Kentucky overran their banks, filled by a month’s worth of rain that fell in a matter of days The water crested 14 feet above flood stage in some places, shattering records. They’ve helped a little, but the dream still haunts her, lightning-seared and vivid. She started taking antidepressants six months ago, something she felt ashamed of at first but doesn’t anymore. That night used to replay every time White went to sleep. They begin to walk through the trees, over the strip mine, out of the forest, in their pajamas and underwear with whatever they were able to carry when they fled. As dawn comes, everything is unrecognizable, the land shifted, houses torn from foundations. She finds her neighbors huddled at the top of the hill. She and her husband run to a hillside and scramble upward, grabbing hold of tree roots and branches. ![]() It hits her in the neck and knocks her off her feet before racing down a street that has become a vengeful river. She’s outside, getting her grandson’s toys out of the yard. The black water comes rushing at the witching hour, barrelling toward her front door in Lost Creek, Kentucky. The dream that haunts Christine White is always the same, and though it comes less frequently, it isn’t any less terrifying.
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