Cleanup efforts at the Isom IGA store in East Kentucky after the flooding of July 2022. (Photo by Malcolm Wilson)

This story was produced through a collaboration between the Daily Yonder, which covers rural America, and Climate Central, a nonadvocacy science and news group.

On the day he would become homeless, Wesley Bryant was awoken by his wife, Alexis.

“Get up,” she told him. “There’s a flood outside.”

It was 8 a.m. on a Thursday in late July, two years ago in rural Pike County, Kentucky, and rain had been pouring for days. Overnight, it got heavier. Homes and vehicles were being swept down the narrow valleys of Eastern Kentucky’s mountainous terrain.

Dozens of people died after more than a foot of rain fell from July 26 through July 30, 2022, flooding 13 rural counties in Eastern Kentucky. Yet as these communities attempt to rebuild, they’re being overlooked for federal spending that’s protecting wealthier and more urbanized Americans from such weather disasters.

Wesley, Alexis, their two daughters and Alexis’ sister evacuated, hiking the half-mile to Alexis’ mother’s house via the mountains behind their own home to avoid flooded roads. They’ve been living there ever since.

Kentucky is a regular victim of flooding. During the past century, more than 100 people have died in storms across the state, including at least 44 two summers ago. Heat-trapping pollution is driving up rainfall rates and flood risks.

Thousands of survivors were forced to move out of damaged homes, including Wesley and his family. Their house, which Wesley’s grandfather built in the 1970s, is unlivable. Insulation peels from the ceiling and the floors bubble with water damage. Finding contractors to fix the house has been difficult because thousands of other flooded properties are also being repaired or replaced.

Their furniture and appliances were destroyed, and Wesley estimates replacing them would cost around $20,000. The family was denied FEMA disaster assistance so they’ve had to foot these costs themselves. “We just need a little help from our government,” he said.

Despite histories of flooding, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) classifies Pike County and the 12 other counties that flooded two years ago as facing “low” risks in the event of a natural disaster like a flood. That’s largely because they have less to lose —financially — compared to more urbanized areas.

Critics of FEMA’s risk-determination tool, called the National Risk Index, say it doesn’t include enough information about rural communities, especially when it comes to flooding, leading it to understate hazards.

That suggests that as the federal government cranks up spending on infrastructure, including the allocation of more than $1 billion to help reduce future flood threats, families in East Kentucky and other rural regions are at risk of missing out on projects that could help them prepare better for the next disaster.

What is the National Risk Index

FEMA developed its National Risk Index to help local and state officials and residents plan for emergencies through an online tool. The agency sourced historic rainfall and other data to characterize these risks, allowing it to paint a national picture of threats from local disasters, findings that influence its spending decisions.

FEMA began developing the risk index in 2016, though initial work dates to 2008. The first iteration of the risk index was released in October 2020, and the data has been updated twice since then, most recently in March 2023.

Work to update how the risk index handles inland flooding is expected early next year. In a press release touting new requirements that forced the coming update, the Biden administration said that in “recent years, communities have seen repeated flooding that threatens both lives and property” but that the agency’s approaches to measuring risks based on historical data “have become outdated.”

The agency is also working on a “climate-informed” risk index looking at future hazards but, so far, inland flooding is not on the list of disasters planned to be included.

FEMA’s national and regional press offices declined to be interviewed or answer questions for this story.

“There’s a bias against, I think, rural communities, especially in the flood dataset,” said Chad Berginnis, executive director of the Association of State Floodplain Managers, a nonprofit that certifies floodplain managers and educates policymakers about flood loss. He said this bias could profoundly confuse or affect emergency managers in those areas.

“It’s giving false results,” Berginnis said. “I think we’ve got to be very thoughtful and very careful on how we use [the risk index] for the hazard of flood in particular.”

The building of homes and communities in vulnerable locations and the effects of heat-trapping pollution are converging to escalate the frequency of weather disasters across the U.S. One of the effects of climate change is an intensification in the amount of rainfall that can fall every hour. A federal report on the latest climate science showed the rainiest days across the Southeast are dumping more than a third more water on average now than was the case in the late 1950s. Ongoing emissions and warming threaten to continue to boost rainfall rates.

“If it’s gone up that much already, we might be wise to be concerned,” said Scott Denning, an atmospheric sciences professor at Colorado State University who studies carbon dioxide, water, and energy cycles. “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

That rain often falls on ground where coal mining excavations removed mountaintops. Researchers overlaid data regarding fatalities from the floods with maps of mountaintop removal mining and found that many of the deaths were downstream from or adjacent to such sites.

Neglecting rural Americans

Todd DePriest doesn’t “believe in Facebook,” but uses his mother’s account to surf the website’s digital marketplace. That’s what he was doing two summers ago when he saw alerts about severe floods in Letcher County, Kentucky, where he serves as the mayor of Jenkins, population 1,800.

Public service announcements warning people to “turn around, don’t drown” during floods were circulating on his mother’s feed. DePriest got up from his computer to look out the window at the torrential rain and realized the threat his own town was about to face.

DePriest jumped in his Jeep to check on the bridge at the lower end of Jenkins. When he got there, the road across the bridge had already flooded.

“I started calling people I knew down there and said, ‘Hey, the water’s up and if you want to get out of here, we’re going to have to do something pretty quick,’” DePriest said.

His next calls were to the fire department to prepare them for the emergencies to which they were likely to respond, then to city workers to get essential maintenance vehicles like garbage trucks to higher ground.

Letcher County was one of the hardest hit of the 13 counties declared federal disaster areas by FEMA. Five of those killed across the region were in Letcher County.

Two years since the floods, the region is still rebuilding. “They (FEMA) were telling us it was going to take four or five, six years to recover and get through this,” DePriest said. “And I thought, well, there’s no way it’s going to take that long.”

Now, DePriest hopes it only takes five years.

“All the processes and dealing with FEMA – and I think they’re fair in what they do – but it’s just a process,” DePriest said.

The National Risk Index multiplies a community’s expected annual loss in dollars by their risk factor. Like most of the east Kentucky counties that flooded two summers ago, Letcher County’s risk level is scored “very low” by the risk index.

That’s because it includes annual asset loss in its equations.

Rural counties like Letcher, where the average home costs about $75,000 and median household income is half the national average, score lower on the risk scale because there are fewer dollars to lose when disaster strikes. The area’s flood hazard threat is deemed relatively high but the potential consequences in financial losses are lower compared with denser areas.

The urban-rural disparity can be examined by comparing how the National Risk Index judges Jackson, Kentucky, a small city about 80 miles southeast of Lexington, with Jackson, Mississippi, the Magnolia State’s populous capital.

Both cities saw disastrous flooding during the summer of 2022. Unlike its namesake in Kentucky, Jackson, Mississippians suffered no flood deaths, though financial damage was far worse —?an estimated $1 billion.

Hinds County – home to Mississippi’s capital – is assigned a “relatively moderate” risk level. Its social vulnerability is categorized as very high, with community resiliency categorized as relatively high, meaning the community is expected to bounce back more effortlessly after disaster. River flooding is deemed the second greatest natural disaster risk, with annual losses estimated at about $15 million.

To compare, Breathitt County, where Jackson, Kentucky, is located, is given a “very low” risk level by the National Risk Index. Its social vulnerability is categorized as relatively high and community resiliency is categorized as very low, suggesting it would need more help after disasters. Although FEMA considers river flooding the greatest disaster risk to the community, its annual losses are rated at just $1.3 million.

This urban-rural difference matters because FEMA uses the National Risk Index to determine how much money communities should receive to better prepare for natural disasters. For example, it’s being used to make decisions about spending $1.2 trillion available to lessen future flood risks under the U.S. Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

The risk index is also used to determine which communities get money through FEMA’s Community Disaster Resilience Zones program, which designated 483 community census tracts as Community Disaster Resilience Zones last year. This means the communities inside those tracts can receive extra money for disaster planning. Of those census tracts, a third are federally classified as rural.

Disaster experts say relying solely on the risk index can disadvantage places that lack long-term weather records — which are often missing from rural communities.

Weather stations can be sparse in treacherous landscapes. Rural areas are among the last to have their flood hazards mapped by FEMA, with the agency prioritizing higher-density regions. And National Weather Service offices tend to be located in more urban areas, according to Melanie Gall, co-director of the Center for Emergency Management Homeland Security at Arizona State University.

“I think that we miss a lot,” she said.

Progress post-flood

Immediately after the July 2022 floods, FEMA and Kentucky Emergency Management began temporarily providing trailers for hundreds of flood survivors. Both programs have since ended.

FEMA gave trailer occupants the option to purchase their units as permanent housing. The trailer cost was determined by a formula that factored the type of unit, its size, and how many months it had been occupied by the interested buyer.

In the middle of the most recent winter, 18 months after torrential rainfall on steep slopes left so many families homeless, federal trailers that hadn’t been paid for were hauled away.

Kentucky’s program offered more flexibility: While the program has ended, three families still live in state-funded campers, according to Julia Stanganelli, flood recovery coordinator for the Housing Development Alliance. The Eastern Kentucky-based affordable housing developer has led the efforts to rehab and rebuild houses lost in the flood using state disaster money.

The three families are living in the campers while they wait for a new housing development to be built above the floodplain in Knott County, Kentucky, Stanganelli said.

East Kentucky’s population was declining long before the floods. Shaping Our Appalachian Region, a nonprofit focused on population retention and growth, estimates Eastern Kentucky has lost nearly 55,000 residents since 2000. The floods accelerated the losses.

During the 2022 floods, already sparse cell service went out entirely, and even the U.S. Weather Service’s on-duty warning meteorologist faced busy or disconnected phone lines, recalls Jane Marie Wix, a warning coordination meteorologist with the Weather Service.

Wix said the creek near her house turned into a “river,” preventing her from reaching work. “I don’t think I’ve ever felt so helpless before.”

Locals are working to better prepare for the next disaster, with or without federal government help.

Todd DePriest, the mayor of Jenkins, worked with the nonprofit law firm Appalachian Citizens Law Center to pay for four stream monitors that can trigger flood warnings.

Wesley Bryant, the Pike County resident whose home flooded two years ago, said he’s called his state representatives “hundreds of times” to keep Eastern Kentucky’s disaster recovery top of mind.

Bryant said he recently felt “pretty defeated” after receiving another notification about failing to qualify for federal assistance. But he said he won’t quit fighting.

“This is my home, this is my commonwealth,” Wesley said. “I’m going to fight for it.”

This article first appeared on The Daily Yonder and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Terry Thies adjusts the post of the bed that belonged to her mother. It’s the same bed she woke up in to find that her home had flooded overnight last July. (Photo by Xandr Brown.)

This story is a collaboration between The Daily Yonder and Grist. For more, watch the Daily Yonder’s video “How Broadband and Weather Forecasting Failed East Kentucky.”?

Terry Thies wasn’t worried about the rain that pounded on her roof last July.?

She had received no flood warnings before going to sleep that night. Besides, her part of rural Perry County in Eastern Kentucky often gets heavy rain.

So early the next morning when her foot hit the water lapping the bottom of her wooden bed frame, Thies’ first thought was that the toilet had overflowed. But as she scanned her bedroom for the water’s source, she realized this was something else entirely.?

“I came into the kitchen and opened the door and water was flowing down the lane,” Thies said. “Water was in my yard and rushing down. And I was like, well, I guess I’ve been flooded.”?

In the days leading up to the storm, the National Weather Service predicted heavy rain and a moderate risk of flooding across a wide swath of eastern Kentucky and West Virginia. What happened instead was a record-breaking four-day flood event in eastern Kentucky that killed a confirmed 43 people and destroyed thousands of homes.?

And though the National Weather Service issued repeated alerts, many people received no warning.

“Not a soul, not one emergency outlet texted me or alerted me via phone,” Thies said.?

“Nobody woke me up.”?

Thies’ experience in the July floods reveals troubling truths about Kentucky’s severe weather emergency alert systems. Imprecise weather forecasting and spotty emergency alerts due to limited cellular and internet access in rural Kentucky meant that Thies and many others were wholly unprepared for the historic flood.?

Efforts to improve these systems are underway, but state officials say expansions to broadband infrastructure will take at least four years to be completed in Kentucky’s most rural counties. In a state where flooding is common, these improvements could be the difference between life and death for rural Kentuckians.?

But there’s no guarantee they’ll come before the next climate change-fueled disaster.??

An urban bias in forecasting

The first system that failed eastern Kentuckians in July was the weather forecasting system, which did not accurately predict the severity of the storm. A built-in urban bias in weather forecasting is partially to blame.?

“Did we forecast (the storm) being that extreme? No, we didn’t,” said Pete Gogerian, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service station in Jackson, Kentucky, which serves the 13 eastern Kentucky counties affected by the July floods.?

For the days preceding the storm, the Jackson station warned of a ‘moderate risk’ of flooding across much of their service area. Observers with the benefit of hindsight might argue that a designation of ‘high risk’ would have been more appropriate. But Jane Marie Wix, a meteorologist at the Jackson station, wrote in an email to the Daily Yonder that the high-risk label is rarely issued, and simply didn’t match what the model was predicting for the July storms.?

“When we have an event of this magnitude, we’ll go back and look at, are there any indicators? Did we miss something? Was there really any model predicting this kind of event?” Gogerian said. “But when you looked at (the flooding in) eastern Kentucky, it just wasn’t there.”

“I don’t think anyone could have predicted just how bad it was going to end up being,” Wix wrote.??

Wix says the moderate risk warning was enough to warn people that the storm could have severe impacts in many locations. But the model’s inaccuracy demonstrates a flaw in the National Weather Service forecasting model system that was used at the time of the flood.?

Extreme weather is hard to predict in any setting, but rural regions like eastern Kentucky are at an additional disadvantage due to an urban bias baked into national weather forecasting systems, according to Vijay Tallapragada, the senior scientist at the National Weather Service’s Environmental Modeling Center.?

Forecasting models depend on observational data — information about past and present weather conditions —to predict what will come next. But there’s more data available for urban areas than for rural areas, according to Tallapragada.?

“Urban areas are observed more than rural areas … and that can have some, I would say, unintended influence on how the models perceive a situation,” he said.

Although spaceborn satellites and remote sensing systems provide a steady supply of rural data, other methods of observation, like aircraft and weather balloons, are usually concentrated in more densely populated areas.

“Historically, many weather observations were developed around aviation, so a lot of weather radars are located at major airports in highly populated cities,” said Jerry Brotzge, Kentucky state climatologist and director of the Kentucky Climate Center. “That leaves a lot of rural areas with less data.”?

Weather prediction models are based on past events, so the lack of historical weather data in rural areas poses a serious challenge for future predictions, according to Brotzge. “For large areas of Appalachia, we just don’t know the climatology there as well as, say, Louisville or some of the major cities,” he said.

This lack of current and historical weather observation can leave rural areas vulnerable to poor weather forecasting, which can have catastrophic results in the case of extreme weather events.?

Rural forecasting solutions?

A new forecasting model, however, could close the gap in rural severe weather prediction.?

The new Unified Forecast System is being developed by the National Weather Service and a group of academic and community partners. The modeling system is set to launch in 2024, but the results so far are promising, according to Tallapragada.

“In the next couple years, we will see a revolutionary change in how we are going to predict short-range weather and the extremes associated with it,” he said.

The problem with the current system, said Tallapragada, is that it depends on one model to do all the work.

A new application called the Rapid Refresh Forecast System is set to replace that single model with an ensemble of 10 models. Using multiple models allows meteorologists to introduce more statistical uncertainty into their calculations, which produces a broader, and more accurate, range of results, according to Tallapragada. He said that although the new system is not yet finished, it has already proven to be on par with, or better than, the current model.?

The Rapid Refresh Forecasting System will mitigate the disparity between urban and rural forecasting because it depends more on statistical probabilities and less on current and historical observational data, which is where the biggest gap in rural data currently lies, according to Tallapragada.

The system could also mean improved accuracy when it comes to predicting severe weather, like Kentucky’s July flood event.

“The range of solutions provided by the new system will capture the extremes much better, independent of whether you are observing better or poorly,” Tallapragada said. “That’s the future of all weather prediction.”

As extreme weather events become more common due to climate change, this advancement in weather forecasting has the potential to transform local and regional responses to severe weather. But without massive investments in broadband, life-saving severe weather alerts could remain out of reach for rural communities.

The crucial role of broadband

Over a year before the July 2022 floods devastated eastern Kentucky, some counties in the same region were hit by floods that, while not as deadly, still upended lives.

“There were no warnings for that flood,” said Tiffany Clair, an Owsley County resident, in a Daily Yonder interview. “It was fast.”

Clair received no warning when extreme rains hit her home in March of 2021, which severely damaged nearby towns like Booneville and Beattyville. “I did not think that those (towns) would recover,” Clair said.

Businesses and homes were impaired for months after the flood, affecting not only the people in those communities but those from neighboring communities as well.

“We live in a region where we travel from township to township for different things, and (the March 2021 floods) were a blow to the region and to the communities, because we’re kind of interlocked around here,” Clair said. “It’s part of being an eastern Kentuckian.”

A little over a year later, Clair faced more flooding, this time enough to displace her and her children. They now live with Clair’s mother.

This time around, Clair did receive an emergency warning, but questioned the method through which these warnings were sent. “(The warnings) did go all night, the last time, in July,” Clair said. “But if you don’t have a signal or if your phone’s dead, how are you getting those?”

During severe weather events, people are alerted of risk through a handful of ways. Weather information reported from regional National Weather Service offices is disseminated through local TV and radio stations, specialized weather radios, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s wireless emergency alert

But in rural eastern Kentucky in July, the most common way people learned about the flooding was by seeing the water rise firsthand, according to a report from the Kentucky Department of Public Health.?

The agency surveyed people from over 400 households in Breathitt, Clay, Floyd, Knott, Letcher, Owsley and Perry counties, as well as displaced residents living in three shelter sites. The goal of the study was to understand how the floods affected Kentuckians and determine ways to better prepare for the next emergency.?

Nearly 14 percent of households in Letcher, Knott, Owsley and Perry counties and 28 percent of households in Breathitt, Clay, Floyd and Pike counties reported difficulty accessing internet, television, radio, and cell service for emergency communications during the floods. Cell phone service and internet access were the top two communication methods residents reported the most difficulty accessing.??

The floods killed a confirmed 43 people: 19 from Knott County, 10 from Breathitt, seven from Perry, four from Letcher, two from Clay, and one from Pike County. Several more people died after the floods due to related health complications.?

In Knott and Breathitt County, where death counts were the highest, approximately 32 percent of residents do not have broadband access, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. And in 10 of the 13 counties flooded in July, more than a quarter of residents lack broadband access.?

Rural areas across the country are underserved when it comes to broadband, but eastern Kentucky is a special trouble spot, where high costs to serve rural customers have stopped internet companies from setting up broadband in rural areas. In 2017, Kentucky ranked 47th in the nation for broadband access, according to the Kentucky Communications Network Authority.?

“There’s a lot of frustration because a lot of these internet service providers are profit-based companies,” said Meghan Sandfoss, executive director of the state’s newly created Office of Broadband Development. “So it’s hard for them sometimes to make a business case for the more remote and low density locations.”

The state’s effort to expand broadband has sputtered for years due to missteps by government officials, according to Propublica reporting. An internet connectivity project, KentuckyWired, was launched in 2013 with the goal to construct 3,000 miles of high-speed fiber optic cable in every Kentucky county by 2018. The project didn’t reach its final steps until fall of 2022, according to a KentuckyWired construction map.

Getting the cable laid down is only one part of the process: for individual households and businesses to actually access the internet, third-party providers need to connect their own fiber systems to the network, according to the Kentucky Communications Network Authority. This “last-mile” infrastructure is critical to broadband expansion, but progress has been slow.?

“That might be another 10 years or 20 years while all that last-mile stuff gets built,” said Doug Dawson, a telecommunications consultant, in a ProPublica interview from 2020.?

To speed up this process, both the state and federal governments have recently directed funds toward improved internet connectivity and last-mile infrastructure.?

In June of 2022, Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear announced a $203 million investment in last-mile infrastructure funded through the American Rescue Plan Act. Another $20 million of grants was opened in September for broadband providers to replace utility poles that provide connectivity in underserved areas. And early this year, another $182 million in federal funding was awarded to fund Kentucky’s “Better Internet” grant program.?

This grant program is focused on making it more commercially feasible for private internet providers to reach rural areas, said Sandfoss from the Office of Broadband Development. The priority is to build broadband infrastructure in unserved locations where there is no internet, versus under-served locations with limited internet access.

“A frustration we hear frequently is that all these new locations are being connected and everybody else has to wait,” Sandfoss said. “But that’s just the federal funding priority, and that’s the way we’ve got to do it.”?

Construction on the state’s broadband infrastructure expansions is expected to occur over the next four years.

As extreme weather continues to batter rural Kentucky — floods in February killed one person in rural Marion County – some locals aren’t waiting for governmental changes to better protect themselves in the face of disaster.?

Terry Thies, whose childhood home was flooded in July, has decided to sell her house.

“Now that it has flooded, it will probably flood again,” Thies said. She plans to move up the mountain, away from the creek that damaged her home. “I just don’t want to go through it again.”

But for Kentuckians who don’t have the financial means to move away from higher-risk flood areas, they may be stuck in place. Eastern Kentucky is in the middle of a major housing crisis: affordable housing is sparse, buildable land outside flood zones is limited, and construction costs for new homes can be prohibitively expensive.?

“(The flood) was horrible, but we were very, very lucky,” said Tiffany Clair, whose home was destroyed in the July flood. Clair and her children were able to move in with her mother when they lost housing. “But the next time I don’t think we’ll be that lucky.”

Clair believes that rural Kentucky’s ability to withstand the next natural disaster hinges on the actions taken by local and state leaders.?

“We can’t do anything to prepare for it. It is going to take our leaders, it is going to take our politicians,” she said.?

“They’re the ones that have to prepare for it because we can’t.”

Additional reporting by Caroline Carlson and Xandr Brown.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/equity/kentucky-flood-extreme-weather-forecast-alert-broadband-internet/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org