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 to be a “thousand-year flood,” with a 1-in-1,000 chance of happening in a given year. Yet they’re happening more often.
The floods have highlighted the resilience of local people to work together for collective survival in rural Appalachia. But they have also exposed the deep vulnerability of communities, many of which are located along creeks at the base of hills and mountains with poor emergency warning systems. As short-term cleanup leads to long-term recovery efforts, residents can face daunting barriers that leave many facing the same flood risks over and over again.
Exposing a Housing Crisis
For the past nine years, I have been conducting research on rural health and poverty in Appalachia. It’s a complex region often painted in broad brushstrokes that miss the geographic, socioeconomic, and ideological diversity it holds.
Appalachia is home to a vibrant culture, a fierce sense of pride, and a strong sense of love. But it is also marked by the omnipresent backdrop of a declining coal industry.
There is considerable local inequality that is often overlooked in a region portrayed as one-dimensional. Poverty levels are indeed high. In Perry County, Kentucky, where one of eastern Kentucky’s larger cities, Hazard, is located, nearly 30 percent of the population lives under the federal poverty line. But the average income of the top 1 percent of workers in Perry County is nearly $470,000—17 times more than the average income of the remaining 99 percent.
