Chester also named Tennessee, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Iowa and Alaska as hot spots. Image: Bloomberg
Floyd County continues to experience flooding and the federal government continues to step in to help.
In July 2022, at least 40 people were killed and 300 homes were damaged when eastern Kentucky County flooded, marking the 13th time in 12 years that the rural county was declared a federal disaster.
These disasters are so costly that local governments feel they can’t afford it all, so the governor asks the president to declare a disaster to free up federal funds.
After that flood, 500 homeless people looked at me, ‘Judge, what are we going to do?'” recalls Judge Robbie Williams, the administrator of the county of just over 35,000. “It’s overwhelming, and it’s only a matter of time before it happens again.
It did. In 2023, Floyd County was declared a disaster area for the 14th time, starting in 2011. And Floyd County isn’t even the most disaster-prone county in the country. In neighboring Johnson County, 15 disasters have been declared by the Federal Emergency Management Agency since 2011.
When it comes to extreme weather and other so-called natural disasters, people typically look to hurricane- or earthquake-prone coasts and say that’s where the danger lies. But that’s not where the highest concentration of federally declared disasters is, according to an atlas of 713 FEMA-declared disasters compiled by New York University’s Institute for Public Knowledge.
While most people think of disasters in terms of direct financial assistance from the federal government to individual victims to cover the costs of lost homes and businesses, the atlas focuses on the $60 billion in FEMA assistance to governments.
Eight of the nine counties with the most federally declared disasters since 2011, more than a dozen each, are in Kentucky, with one in Vermont. Those counties have four to five times as many disasters as the national average of three over the past 13 years.
California and Louisiana and I would say now even Texas, Florida, certainly, they suck up all the oxygen when you hear about these massive storms, said atlas maker Amy Chester, executive director of the disaster-prevention nonprofit Rebuild By Design. But what you don’t hear about are these storms that happen all the time, and are just becoming more common in places like Vermont.
Chester also named Tennessee, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Iowa and Alaska as hot spots.
We want to show that climate change is already here, Chester said of the data, which covers 2011 to 2023 but doesn’t include heat waves, droughts or COVID. Communities are suffering everywhere.
Before she crunched the data, Chester said she thought Vermont would be a refuge from climate change. Cooler. Inland. Instead, it’s a disaster hotspot.
It’s horrible, Chester said. It keeps happening to them.
A few days later, Vermont was hit by flooding again, this time from the remnants of Hurricane Beryl.
According to FEMA, flooding is the most common disaster in the United States. Since 2011, FEMA has distributed more than $41 billion in hurricane relief, the most of any disaster.
What the data tell us is that the frequency and severity of disasters at the local-state level are increasing, with rural, suburban and urban areas nationwide being affected,” Susan Cutter, co-director of the Hazards Vulnerability and Resilience Institute at the University of South Carolina, said in an email. She was not part of Chester’s study. More needs to be done to increase resilience and reduce the impact on people.
The largest county in the country without a federally declared disaster since 2011 is Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, home to the city of Charlotte.
Charlotte Emergency Services Chief Robert Graham says we’re blessed. He attributes the lack of federal disasters to luck, good governance and geography.
“We’re somewhat protected from the coast,” Graham said of the interior province. “We don’t get all the impacts from the mountains. Charlotte seems to be in a somewhat favorable position.”
Graham said a comfortable reserve fund and planning have kept the city from having to turn to the federal government for financial help after disasters like the 2019 flood. But he said he knows it’s only a matter of time before the city’s luck runs out.
Luck has long since left eastern Kentucky.
In Floyd County, geography and government regulations make it difficult, Williams said. In the mountainous county, people live in narrow valley floors in old coal camps, he said. And when it rains, the increasingly shallow creeks overflow.
“We are seeing historic flooding,” Williams said. “It is only going to get worse.
Environmental regulations don’t allow local officials to dredge the creeks, which are increasingly filling up with silt that comes down from the mountains, often from development, Williams said. Some creeks were 20 feet deep decades ago but are now shallow enough to walk on, he said.
“The problem is the rain has nowhere to go,” Williams said.
Data from the National Weather Service shows that Floyd County now averages more than 50 inches of rain per year, up from 42 to 43 inches per year in the mid-1980s. Warmer air holds more moisture, and studies and statistics show that the eastern United States is not only getting more rain, but also more intense, flood-causing downpours.
Floyd County has received more than $35 million in FEMA disaster aid since 2011. That’s not even the maximum, as much of the money went to areas devastated by hurricanes.
Five counties, three of which are in New York, received more than $1 billion in FEMA aid, led by Manhattan’s New York County, which received $8.9 billion, almost all of it from Hurricane Sandy in 2012. All five of the largest counties were hit by one or more hurricanes.
Chester’s group decided to look at constituencies and how they compare to each other in disaster areas, especially given that the House of Representatives was nearly evenly divided.
Nearly 60 counties have had at least 10 federally declared disasters since 2011, and nearly 70 percent of them are represented in Congress by Republicans. About 280 counties have had no disasters in that time, and 87 percent of them are represented by Democrats, according to the NYU data.
Chester noted that Republicans don’t talk about climate change during the campaign, but said research shows extreme weather is not a partisan issue.
More important is how state and local policies create or minimize risks for future disasters, said Samantha Montano, a professor of emergency management at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy. And in Floyd County, the government is using FEMA money to buy the homes of 150 residents to move them out of harm’s way, but some don’t want to leave, Williams said.
Until we get those homes out of the floodplains, we’re still going to have these problems, Williams said.
(Only the headline and image of this report may have been edited by Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)