Appalachians Are Trapped in a Disastrous Cycle of Flooding and Rebuilding

THIS ARTICLE IS republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. On Valentine’s Day 2025, heavy rains started to fall in parts of rural Appalachia. Over the course of a few days, residents in eastern Kentucky watched as river levels rose and surpassed flood levels. Emergency teams conducted over 1,000 water rescues. Hundreds, if not thousands of people were displaced from homes, and entire business districts filled with mud. For some, it was the third time in just four years that their homes had flooded, and the process of disposing of destroyed furniture, cleaning out the muck, and starting anew is beginning again. Floods wiped out businesses and homes in eastern Kentucky in February 2021, July 2022, and now February 2025. An even greater scale of destruction hit eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina in September 2024, when Hurricane Helene’s rainfall and flooding decimated towns and washed out parts of major highways. Each of these events was considered ... Read full article.