Kentucky Flooding: Death Toll in Kentucky Flooding Rises to 25 (Published 2022) (2024)

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‘We need help’: Death toll rises in devastating Kentucky flooding.

“I said, ‘Ethel, are you getting in that helicopter?’” Ms. Stamper recalled on Friday, sitting in the auditorium of Gospel Light Baptist Church along with dozens of others rendered homeless in the regionwide devastation. “She said: ‘Yes, I am.’”

The rain continued to fall in parts of eastern Kentucky on Friday, and creeks and rivers were still swelling. But where the floodwaters were receding, the destruction of the past two days was coming slowly but dreadfully into view. At least 25 people had died, according to reports from the governor’s office and local officials.

Gov. Andy Beshear said repeatedly that the toll would almost certainly rise.

In the rugged topography of central Appalachia, many places were still cut off on Friday, and determining the toll of devastation could take weeks. There was more rain in the forecast for early next week, adding even greater urgency to rescue efforts. “We’ve got to act quickly after the water recedes tomorrow,” Mr. Beshear said, “certainly before it rains again.”

In Breathitt County, Jeffrey Noble, the judge executive, said the storm and the flooding had knocked out the phones for miles around. Even in the county seat of Jackson, he said, main roads and arteries were still blocked.

“They’re saying around 250 people are missing,” he said. “I don’t even want to talk about deaths. I’ve heard two different numbers, and I’m hoping both of them are wrong.”

He was shaken by the stories he had heard from people in the county as well as the things he had seen firsthand, including a truck he had watched as it was slowly overtaken by water in the middle of the night.

“Homes are washed away, communities are washed away, roads are washed away,” Mr. Noble said. “I’ve heard of hundred-year floods, but this is way beyond that. In the history of Kentucky, our county has never seen anything like this.”

On Friday, the death toll rose throughout the day. Perry County’s Emergency Management director, Jerry Stacy, said the county’s numbers rose from one to four victims by evening. The coroner from Breathitt County, Hargis Epperson, said at least three in the county were confirmed dead in the floods, with at least a dozen missing. And the Knott County coroner, Corey Watson, who was working out of a large garage at a local funeral home, said on Friday that he had confirmed 14 fatalities, up from 11 that morning.

“There’s still people unaccounted for,” Mr. Watson added.

What was known on Friday was already heartbreaking. Among the dead were at least six children, including four from one family.

Riley Noble Jr., 6, and Nevaeh Noble, 4, were found on Thursday, and on Friday their siblings, Maddison Noble, 8, and Chance Noble, 1, were discovered, all within 50 yards of one another, a relative, Brittany Trejo, said.

When their parents got an alert about the flash foods at 2 a.m. on Thursday, the family had only minutes to escape, Ms. Trejo said, recounting what she had been told by her cousin Amber Smith, the children’s 23-year-old mother.

In the few minutes that Ms. Smith was able to get the children dressed, water had already begun to pour into their mobile home. The family climbed on top of the trailer in the darkness to wait out the flood, Ms. Trejo said, “but they were only up there for a very short time before they realized that their home is about to be swept away.”

Holding hands with the older children and hugging the younger ones tight, the family “floated” from the top of their trailer to a nearby tree, she said. There, they held onto one another, watching their home float away and shouting for help. Still, the water rose higher. And “one by one,” Ms. Trejo said, the four children were pulled away from the tree by the current. “The rage of the water took their children out of their hands,” Ms. Trejo said. After some eight hours of clutching the tree to stay alive, the parents were rescued by a stranger in a kayak.

“They were such loving, caring, well behaved young children,” Ms. Trejo said. “They liked things that all children enjoy.”

Mr. Beshear told reporters that the National Guard, the State Police and other state agencies were helping with search and rescue efforts, which included about 50 aerial rescues and hundreds of rescues by boat. Nearly 300 people had been rescued across the state, he said, about 100 of whom were taken to safety by aircraft.

Many who had survived the flooding were then endangered by the isolation that came in the aftermath. Roads were washed out or buried in mudslides, stranding residents, many of them older and in ill health, in flood-ravaged valleys without water or electricity. According to PowerOutage.us, which aggregates data from utilities, about 20,000 customers were without power in the hardest hit counties in Kentucky on Friday evening.

In the mountains of central Appalachia, flooding can be terrifyingly sudden, with water rushing down barren, mine-stripped hillsides or pouring down in summer thunderstorms. Families who live along creeks in the hollows often have little warning and few escape routes, which is why floods in the region have been so deadly in the past. But the flooding on Thursday was the worst in local memory.

“I’ve talked to several folks in the last couple of days who were 70, 80 years old and none of them remember anything like this,” said Jeff Hawkins, who has lived for 52 years in a Letcher County hollow that is now lined with flood-wrecked buildings and half-submerged trucks.

The relative remoteness of many towns in central Appalachia is a challenge in times like this, but it also fosters a particular kind of self-reliance. As the waters rose on Thursday, neighbors launched into the floodwaters in their boats to find people who needed rescuing.

After the worst had passed on Thursday morning, Jamie and Julie Hatton stepped out of their home in Whitesburg to find a city that, in many parts, was still submerged. They set out to rescue one friend by kayak, only to hear that more were stranded when they arrived at the edge of the floodwaters.

Kayaks proved to be no match for the swift current, Ms. Hatton said, and soon people showed up in their motorboats. Mr. Hatton, who is the Letcher County attorney, estimated he spent about six hours helping with water rescues on Thursday.

“At that time it was very desperate,” Ms. Hatton said.

The focus on Friday was on the cost in human lives, but the floodwaters also damaged irreplaceable repositories of eastern Kentucky culture. The waters that rose in Whitesburg, a cultural center of this part of Appalachia, engulfed the buildings belonging to Appalshop, a 53-year-old arts and education center, flooding the radio studio and exhibition space and sending bits of archival material out onto Main Street.

In the little town of Hindman, in Knott County, the Appalachian School of Luthiery, where craftsmen learn the art of building dulcimers and other stringed instruments, was ruined, said Christy Boyd, the director of development at the Appalachian Artisan Center.

“There aren’t a lot of dulcimer people anymore,” Ms. Boyd said. “So when you lose something, it’s not just monetary; it can’t be replaced because nobody’s doing it.” A similar observation could be made about many of the little towns throughout central Appalachia, which had been slowly dying for decades before they were drowned in a sudden flood. “We barely have anything, and to lose what you have,” she said, trailing off.

In a hotel in Letcher County, Jeannie Adams gathered with her family and her in-laws, at a loss for what the days ahead may bring. The morning before, she and her son had waded from their front porch through ever-deepening waters.

“I got afraid,” she said. “And I said, ‘Let’s go back.’ But there was no going back. The current of the water pulled us apart. And as a mother that was. …”

She paused to gather herself. “It was terrifying,” she said.

Along a vegetation-choked embankment, where train tracks used to run, they made their way out of the flooded hollow to safety. But they lost their home and almost everything in it. “There’s so many of us that lost everything they had except the shirt on their back,” Ms. Adams said. “And we need help. Desperately, some of us desperately need help.”

Maham Javaid, Shawn Hubler, Jesus Jiménez, Serge F. Kovaleski and McKenna Oxenden contributed reporting.

A coroner in a small county where ‘everybody knows everybody’ is tested.

“There’s still people unaccounted for,” Mr. Watson said Friday evening.

Mr. Watson said the names would be released once families were identified.

“As a small county, it’s been difficult,” Mr. Watson said. The county seat of Knott County, Hindman, is situated in the mountains of eastern Kentucky and has a population of fewer than 1,000 people.

“This has probably been the most trying for the staff,” added Mr. Watson. “Everybody knows everybody.”

Mr. Watson and a deputy have received assistance from coroners from Rowen and Boyd counties, the state’s mass fatality incident response team, as well as state and local police and fire and rescue teams.

Mr. Watson, who was elected to his position in 2018, said his office has had training in dealing with traumatic events.

“We’ve been able to efficiently” process the fatalities without incident as of yet, he said.

But the lack of power and water in the area has made that more difficult.

“It’s pretty tough,” Mr. Watson said.

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A couple lost four children in the floodwaters.

A cousin of Ms. Smith, Brittany Trejo, shared the family’s story, as it had been told to her by Ms. Smith.

All told, of the 25 people who had been reported dead by Friday evening, six of them were children.

Ms. Trejo said that the bodies of the children — Madison Noble, 8; Riley Jr., 5; Nevaeh Noble, 4; and Chance Noble, 2 — were found on Friday in Knott County.

Ms. Smith, 23, and Mr. Noble, who is also in his 20s, survived.

The parents received an alert about flash floods at 2 a.m. Thursday. Ms. Smith looked out the window and saw “a little bit of water that wasn’t alarming in one moment but became alarming in the next moment,” Ms. Trejo said.

In the few minutes that it took Ms. Smith to put clothes and jackets on her four children, their trailer began to flood. She realized that they would drown if they stayed inside.

The parents took the children outside, but water was coming in from all directions. “There was nowhere to go and no place to drive to,” Ms. Trejo said.

In the dark, the family climbed atop the trailer, where they thought they would be safe.

“But they were only up there for a very short time before they realized that their home is about to be swept away,” Ms. Trejo said.

Holding hands with the older children and hugging the younger ones tight, the family floated from the top of their mobile home to a nearby tree, Ms. Trejo said.

“Amber said that all she could see around her was water and it was getting higher and higher even as they were getting on the tree,” Ms. Trejo said.

As the family clung to the tree and to one another, rain continued to pelt them, Ms. Trejo said. They watched their trailer float away.

They tried to call for help, but 911 was down, Ms. Trejo said.

As the water rose higher, each of the four children was swept away from the tree. “The rage of the water took their children out of their hands,” Ms. Trejo said.

The parents remained clinging to the tree for six to eight hours before they were rescued by a man in a kayak who was rowing from home to home seeing who needed help.

“They were a very loving family, very close-knit,” Ms. Trejo said. “Amber has never spent a night away from any of her kids.”

Steven Smith, an uncle, fondly remembered that Madison loved school. His sister, Brandi Smith, recalled that Nevaeh liked dolls.

Riley and Chance spent much of their time playing with each other. “Even when they found the bodies, theirs were the closest,” he said. “I know they hung on to each other till the very end.”

The tally of people unaccounted for after a disaster is often a sign of uncertainty.

With the flooding in Kentucky, the authorities have yet to even arrive at a reliable count of missing and unaccounted for people. Gov. Andy Beshear noted that communication remains “very difficult,” with some communities still largely cut off from cell service.

“It’s going to be very challenging to get a good number,” Mr. Beshear said in a news conference on Friday.

“There’s still a lot of people out there, still a lot of people unaccounted for,” Mr. Beshear said. “We’re going to do our best to find them all.”

He said it could take weeks before officials have a true grasp of how many lives have been lost.

For people to be considered unaccounted for, typically a relative or friend had not been able to reach them and reported it to the authorities. After the massive tornado that ripped through Kentucky last year, more than 100 people were unaccounted for, in addition to 74 people initially reported killed. But over time, those figures settled to a death toll of 80 people.

After a tornado in 2020 in Tennessee, officials in Putnam County released a list with 77 names of people who had been reported as unaccounted for — a list that rapidly shrunk as cell service returned or people were able to get to a safer place, where their family, friends and the authorities could reach them.

This month, as the Dismal River swelled beyond its banks in southwestern Virginia, dozens of people were reported as unaccounted for, out of reach as homes were swept off their foundations and water rushed over roads. Within 48 hours, the authorities reported, all of them had been accounted for, alive and uninjured.

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A mayor, still recovering from personal loss, helps a town facing devastation.

A year after taking office, Ms. Craft is dealing with more devastation.

As of Friday morning, Ms. Craft said, Letcher County, Ky., had eight deaths, two in Whitesburg, as a result of the flooding that has crippled multiple eastern Kentucky counties.

She spent the morning touring the Upper Bottom neighborhood of Whitesburg, which probably saw the worst of the flooding. She offered biscuits donated from a local McDonald’s and told residents she was trying to locate dumpsters for debris and trash. The city’s dumpsters, she said, had been washed away in the flood.

Residents described how the waters from the North Kentucky Fork River, which winds around the neighborhood, engulfed the area.

Jerry Cornett, 75, woke up at 4 a.m. to have coffee on his front porch. The rain at the time, he said, didn’t seem worrisome.

“I went back to bed. That was my mistake,” Mr. Cornett said, recounting that he heard neighbors banging on his door and windows at 7:30 a.m. By then, Mr. Cornett said, local residents were already retrieving residents from their homes via kayak.

Mr. Cornett called his nephew, Jeff Cornett of Cumberland, Ky., who left a conference in Louisville to return and help Mr. Cornett and other family members.

“You cry a while, laugh a while — just go through all the emotions,” Mr. Cornett said.

Rebecca Cook, 38, lives two streets up the hill from where the worst of the flooding happened in Upper Bottom. Ms. Cook, a dentist who returned to her hometown seven years ago, said her basem*nt saw about a foot and a half of water. She and her husband were just some of the people getting in kayaks to help people.

“Nobody was grieving at that point — just pitching together,” Ms. Cook said. “I don’t really think there was time to think about anything.”

Another local couple, Jamie and Julie Hatton, watched the devastation unfold on social media. The two still had cell service in the early morning hours of Thursday, but Ms. Hatton said they didn’t know how disastrous the floods had been since much of the town had lost service.

Their home in the Westwood neighborhood was untouched, so they left home to help. Mr. Hatton, 46, said that when the currents were too strong for kayaks or battery-operated boats, people lent their motorized boats to go from neighborhood to neighborhood.

“It was so swift, you really could not do anything in a kayak,” said Ms. Hatton, 40.

Mr. Hatton, who serves as the Letcher County attorney, estimated he assisted in water rescues for a total of six hours on Thursday. In that time, he said he and others rescued about 15 people.

A knock on their door saved their lives. But that was only the start of their dramatic rescue.

“I’m calling Amanda our hero because she saved us from drowning,” Ms. Stamper said from a makeshift shelter in the auditorium of Gospel Light Baptist Church in Hazard. “We lost our house, our car and our two trailers, but we’re alive.”

Their path from their home to the shelter was far from assured. After piling into Amanda’s car, Ms. Stamper said, they reached a bridge that was surrounded by rising water on all sides. A neighbor attached his truck to the bridge’s guardrail with a chain, weighed it down with an excavator, and began telling those stuck in their cars to pile into the truck or onto the truck bed.

“The whole time I was in that back seat I was praying, and then the National Guard came in a helicopter,” Ms. Stamper said. “I had to ditch my pajamas and I lost my shoes, so when it came time for me to get on the helicopter and Amanda was helping me run there, I had on just my panties running through the flood mud and my pajamas with half the buttons missing. I really looked a fright.”

The National Guard delivered the Stampers and a handful of others to the Perry County Municipal Airport, where a church van from Gospel Light transferred them to safety. Ms. Stamper found clean clothes and toiletries, while volunteers worked with a local pharmacy to fill prescriptions for medications that her mother-in-law needed.

Ms. Stamper said they were thankful to be rescued, but heartbroken by what they lost in Dwarf. “That was my little corner of heaven,” she said, “and now it’s gone.”

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The death toll from the flooding could rise for weeks, Kentucky’s governor says.

There was no official change in the death toll on Friday afternoon because some deaths needed to be verified, but Mr. Beshear said that at least six children had died. Many people remained unaccounted for, he said.

Mr. Beshear said he flew over Breathitt, Perry and Jackson Counties. In Perry County, there had been a number of mudslides, roads were impassable, he said, and much of the city of Jackson was underwater.

“A number of homes are nearly totaled,” Mr. Beshear said, adding that the city of Jackson is “under more water than I think any of us have ever seen in that area — absolutely impassable.”

Deanne Criswell, the administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, who joined the governor on the flyover, said that they saw many areas where floodwaters had yet to recede. Many communities are going to be inaccessible for some time because “the roads are out and bridges are out,” she said.

“We know that there’s definitely some significant impact to the communities that we just flew over,” Ms. Criswell said.

Floodwaters are expected to recede in some areas on Saturday, which would give search-and-rescue teams an opportunity to reach more people, Mr. Beshear said.

“We’ve got to act quickly after the water recedes tomorrow,” Mr. Beshear said. There is rain in the forecast for Monday, leading to concerns that flood levels may rise again, he said.

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Here is how to help victims of the flooding in Kentucky.

“The people impacted by this are going to lose just about everything,” Mr. Beshear said at a news conference on Friday, adding that officials believed that thousands of people had been affected by the flooding.

Here are some ways to help the victims.

The Team Eastern Kentucky Flood Relief Fund, which was established by Mr. Beshear, is accepting tax-deductible donations online and by mail to help people who were affected by the floods.

The American Red Cross in Kentucky said it was working with local emergency management officials to assess needs in about nine counties. The organization is taking donations to help in the recovery.

The Kentucky Department of Agriculture is accepting donations of bottled water, toiletries and nonperishable food. The collection site is 105 Corporate Drive, Suite A, in Frankfort, the state capital. The department is accepting donations from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. on weekdays through Aug. 5.

The Appalachian Regional Healthcare Foundation Flood Relief Fund is accepting monetary donations online to help provide victims with generators, transportation, food, water and access to health care and medicine. The organization is also accepting donations of cleaning supplies, nonperishable food and water at its office at 2260 Executive Drive in Lexington.

The Foundation for Appalachian Kentucky, a nonprofit community group in Hazard, Ky., said it was accepting donations through its Crisis Aid Fund.

Save the Children, which works to protect children in emergencies, is accepting donations to its Eastern Kentucky Flood Crisis Fund to help families with water, hygiene kits, diapers and other supplies.

Dramatic scenes reflect flooding, rescues and lives upended in Kentucky.

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Tennessee floods offer a preview of the ‘extremely long road’ Kentucky faces.

The flood in Tennessee was a flash flood, the water vanishing nearly as rapidly as it arrived, while in Kentucky the floodwaters have lingered and continued to rise. But the scenes of devastation — and the fears about the fallout — are in many ways similar.

The flooding in Tennessee, which struck a collection of communities in the wooded stretch between Nashville and Memphis last August, killed 20 people. The victims included 7-month-old twins and a 60-year-old woman who was pulled by the water from her husband’s arms. One person after another in Waverly described the panic and anguish they felt as they watched relatives and neighbors being carried off by the water, powerless to help.

“Even though it’s killing me that I lost two babies,” Danielle Hall said during a funeral service for her twins, Ryan and Rileigh, “I know that at least they were together.”

The grief was compounded by the physical devastation. Many families lost most, if not all, of their possessions.

“We have an extremely long road to go,” Sheriff Chris Davis of Humphreys County, which includes Waverly and the other hardest-hit communities, said after the floodwater had disappeared, leaving only destruction and loss in its wake.

St. Louis flooded again after more rain.

The St. Louis Fire Department said it responded to 75 flood-related emergencies over a period of about four hours on Thursday afternoon. No injuries were immediately reported, but 60 residents required rescues or needed help getting to safety, the department said.

Six children at a day care center were among those who were rescued on Thursday after they were trapped in a “dwelling with rising flood water,” the department said. No one was hurt, according to the department.

Many of those who were rescued on Thursday were drivers who were stuck in their vehicles after roads flooded and became impassable, according to the Fire Department.

Parts of the St. Louis area recorded more than three inches of rain on Thursday, according to the National Weather Service. That was much less rain than fell on Tuesday, when more than 12 inches of rain were recorded in some parts of St. Louis County, said Chris Kimble, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in St. Louis.

A combination of high rates of rainfall and ground that was already saturated from Tuesday contributed to Thursday’s flooding, Mr. Kimble said.

“All that rain coming down in a short period of time, it overwhelmed drainage, so the water just had nowhere to go,” Mr. Kimble said. “On Tuesday, it was coming down in buckets for about six hours.”

St. Louis was expected to stay dry on Friday and Saturday before another chance of rain on Sunday, Mr. Kimble said.

“But it doesn’t look like a significant, heavy type of rain,” he said.