Whitney Kimball Coe:

Welcome to Everywhere Radio. Everywhere Radio is a production of The Rural Assembly. And I’m your host, Whitney Kimball Coe Kimball Coe. Each episode I spotlight the good, scrappy and joyful ways rural people and their allies are building a more inclusive nation. The following episode isn’t exactly about joy, however. It’s the opposite. More specifically, in this episode, we offer a glimpse of the fallout that a company’s natural disaster…Climate change is making itself felt across the country and the globe. But this past July, it hit home for us literally. The Center for Rural Strategies, which is the organization I work for, is headquartered in Whitesburg, Kentucky. And this summer a massive flood wiped out homes and businesses and livelihoods in Eastern Kentucky. Our office sits in the heart of Downtown Whitesburg and it was spared.

But many of our friends and neighbors were not so fortunate. Only those who’ve experienced such a thing can describe the power of water and gravity coming together to turn whole neighborhoods into lakes. The flood in Kentucky was so intense, it broke windows, sent cars down gulches and launched furniture into treetops. 39 lives were lost and many more were near lost. And as of this recording, many schools have yet to reconvene for the fall semester. For this Everywhere Radio episode, we wanted to talk with people on the front lines who are bearing witness to the devastation and finding ways to serve their community. We’ll talk with Jessica Shelton Shelton with Kentucky Mutual Aid in a few minutes. But first we’re going to talk with Katie Myers Myers, who is a writer, theater artist and audio producer, living in Whitesburg. Katie Myers works as a reporter with the Ohio Valley Resource and WMMT radio station, and her work has appeared in the Daily Yonder, Belt Magazine and Scalawag Magazine among others. And on July 28th, Katie Myers was participating in the Appalachian Writers’ Workshop at Hindman Settlement School in Knott County, Kentucky, and she woke up that morning to a raging flood.

Katie Myers, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me on Everywhere Radio. How are you?

Katie Myers:

Thank you for having me. I’m doing okay. A little overwhelmed, but making it through.

Whitney Kimball Coe:

Yeah, I know you’re really busy right now. You mentioned you have a lot of projects going on. Can you describe some of those? Are they related to the flood?

Katie Myers:

Yeah, I think really the project right now is to figure out how best to cover this flood as the initial media hype and attention around it dies down and we enter the next phase of recovery. So there’s a lot of little pieces to pull apart and focus on. So it’s my work right now.

Whitney Kimball Coe:

Yeah. So you woke up to the flood on the 28th and I know it was surrounding Hindman and all throughout Knott County. What was that like?

Katie Myers:

First off, it had been raining nonstop and not just rain, but crazy rain. I was drinking a cup of coffee and the wind and the rain knocked it off the table next to me and smashed it into a wall, where it shattered kind of wind and rain. So I’ve lived in East Kentucky long enough to know that maybe the creeks were possibly not going to stay put, but I still went to sleep. Slept like a baby, honestly.

Katie Myers:

I was asleep on top of a hill and I just woke up to the general manager at WMMT, Tea Wimer calling me and asking if I was okay and I didn’t see any reason why I shouldn’t be okay. And then [inaudible 00:03:58] got up and looked out the window and it turned out that we were in an island and Hindman was underwater. So that was about 6:00 AM.

Whitney Kimball Coe:

Oh my goodness. And what did you see when you looked out? You said it’s underwater. What did you see around you?

Katie Myers:

Well, Troublesome Creek burst its banks and so by then it had already started to recede and it wasn’t rushing in the way that I think it was overnight. But people’s trucks were in the creek. There were cars in the creek. The James Still cabin on Hindman’s property where there were a lot of archives housed, people were starting to get in there and get their muck boots on and get all of these precious archives out.

Katie Myers:

So as I woke up and got going, I started helping people carry instruments and stuff that were just covered in mud, and Hindman itself, there was just water on the street and it wasn’t passable. There were chunks of buildings and chunks of road just scattered around and people just… One thing you don’t realize, I think if you haven’t been in a disaster is just the shell shock that everybody feels. It’s just this collective feeling that settles on everyone and people are just… You just walk around and people are just standing around and looking at everything just silently. Nobody really knows what to do.

Whitney Kimball Coe:

So one of my friends visit Hindman settlement with you that day and she said she saw you grab your recorder and some of, I guess, reporting materials that you would use. It’s almost like you knew that you needed to start documenting. So I imagine you were shell shocked, but also it sounds like you moved pretty quickly to, I need to make sure I’m taking the pulse of what’s happening right now. Is that accurate?

Katie Myers:

Yeah, I knew people probably weren’t going to want to talk yet, so I just tried to get some sounds. You want to get natural sound of the water rushing, which you could still hear in places. And so I just tried to get that. But I knew the night before and I remember saying to a couple of people, “If this rain keeps going, I’m going to have a job to do.” So I had it in [inaudible 00:06:23] that I might have to get up and get going.

Whitney Kimball Coe:

Mm-hmm. Was there any concern on your part that you might not get off of that mountain where you were going to be stuck?

Katie Myers:

I was worried it would take a while. I think I didn’t realize how quickly the flood waters would go down, which is in flash flooding, the water just comes then it goes, in a day it’s pretty much all the way down or in a few hours. Whereas a river flood can take a lot longer. And river floods are more what I’m accustomed to hearing about. So yeah, me and a friend of mine who had come from Whitesburg, we spent four hours on the porch debating what to do.

Katie Myers:

We didn’t know which road and you couldn’t get good information. First of all, we didn’t have service. You’d call the transportation cabinet and they’d be like, “We don’t know either.” And so it was tough to get good information about the roads and eventually you just had to go try.

Whitney Kimball Coe:

And I guess you all had a car. I know some of them were submerged by that time.

Katie Myers:

We were lucky.

Whitney Kimball Coe:

Yeah. So then you come down the mountain, where did you go after that?

Katie Myers:

We just went back to Whitesburg. I don’t think we quite realized how… We had a sense of how bad it was. And we knew the roads had been cut off. So that’s why we waited a while because it took longer because that was a river flood. It’s usually a half hour trip. And instead of going the half hour way, there was a landslide. So we had to go all the way around [inaudible 00:07:57], which was two hours and then down to Whitesburg via 23. And when we got there, the water had gone down, but there was four cars smashed into each other in the road and just mud everywhere. Everything smelled bad. Just-

Whitney Kimball Coe:

What kind of smells? I’m interested.

Katie Myers:

Yeah, it’s sewage, honestly. Chemicals, gas, just this very nasty combination of things. And as it started to dry, it started to turn particulate and in the air.

Whitney Kimball Coe:

So I visited Whitesburg I guess a week or two after the flood waters had receded and I guess a lot of those smells had dissipated, but the mud stayed and I saw people’s lives out on the curb. Clearly people have had to pull out insulation walls, flooring, carpets, all their furniture, all the things that make up a home.

Katie Myers:

There’s this neighborhood called Upper Bottom, which it’s on the walking trail. I was used to seeing the cats and the little kids riding their bikes and saying hello to people as they pass by. And it’s just completely dark. Nobody’s there right now.

Whitney Kimball Coe:

Yeah. So wearing your reporter hat, in a way you’ve got a job to do, to tell the story of what’s happening and how it’s unfolding. And now as you mentioned, now that other media coverage has receded, how do we step in and start to tell the story of what’s next? What are some of the big questions that you’re grappling with that you would like some answers to this moment?

Katie Myers:

To me, the big question that underlines a disaster like this is, where are people going to live? Housing is a huge… It was already a crisis here. I’m living in my employer’s house because I couldn’t find a affordable place to live. And that was two years ago. So for renters particularly, it’s tough. A lot of homeowners are dealing with, maybe they inherited the house, they don’t really have the deed because whatever, just the house has been passed around.

Katie Myers:

There’s just going to be a lot of trouble in trying to get houses restored or trying to get people out of the flood zone. People may not want to go or if they do, they’re just may not be enough housing for them here. So that’s a big question. Obviously FEMA and how they’re dealing with this. Yeah, there’s just a lot to piece apart and above all, it’s also just about, I think I want people to understand the experience of living through a disaster in both the bureaucratic demands that are on you as you attempt to recover all of this paperwork. You have to do all this documenting, you have to do all the while you’re in this state of shock and you’re just trying to survive.

Katie Myers:

And so I feel like part of my job is I just want people to understand that because unfortunately that’s something that increasingly a lot of people are going to deal with. Most of us are probably going to deal with some version of this over the course of our lives.

Whitney Kimball Coe:

Well as somebody who hasn’t really lived through a natural disaster yet, I have a very practical question, like the one you were facing on the porch of Hindman where you were trying to figure out is there a safe way to get off this mountain and who do I call to find out. What is the first call you make or what is the first step you take after your house has been consumed by water?

Katie Myers:

People describe that time as total chaos and absolutely moving by instinct. And I think from what I’ve heard, a lot of people tried to get to higher ground. They held onto trees. One friend of mine got in her car and just went to her field, which was like maybe the water would go a little slower. I will say the advice is not to drive in a flood, but some people did drive.

Whitney Kimball Coe:

I’ve heard that.

Katie Myers:

But there were Swift Water rescues. We’re in a place where a lot of people have boats inside [inaudible 00:12:25] sides. And I will say those came in handy.

Whitney Kimball Coe:

And then after the waters recede, how do people find the help that they need at the outset?

Katie Myers:

That’s a great question. A lot of people called emergency services, although on the night of most emergency services were flooded out of their own HQs. Most fire departments couldn’t… Like that Hindman Fire Department couldn’t get to their building or their trucks and one of their trucks ended up in the creek. But I think calling emergency management was a route for some people if they had that number. Or I think a lot of people, this is speculation, but I’m sure a lot of people just try to get in touch with their families first off and maybe tried to share information that way, share information with their neighbors.

Katie Myers:

Because especially cell service was just down for a lot of folks and internet was down so maybe you couldn’t even call anybody. Maybe you just went and knocked on your neighbor’s doors and tried to figure out what had happened.

Whitney Kimball Coe:

Yeah, because when I was there two weeks later in Whitesburg, it seemed like folks were still trying to create central sources of support or resources or a lot of folks were calling in Mutual Aid but not clear about next steps yet. So that chaos is really difficult to live in for so long.

Katie Myers:

No chaos is the right word. I just think information is difficult to come by, which is why it was so sad that our radio station was down. We wanted to be able to be in the position to do that and we would’ve been, but our station was flooded so we couldn’t broadcast.

Whitney Kimball Coe:

So how quickly were you able to get that back up and what were some of the first things that you put out on the air?

Katie Myers:

It took about a month. Our operations coordinator and general manager did a lot of that work and it was a heroic effort and it’s worth asking them about, because essentially it involved taking a side by side up a mountain to get to our tower and all this other stuff. Yeah, it’s a wild story, but it took a month. So right now we’re just pretty much doing prerecorded stuff, playlists and I’m mixing some stories and we’re trying to get our public affairs programming back up and get a lot of PSAs going just to deliver information as much as we can.

Whitney Kimball Coe:

You’ve been on the air for a while, you’ve been a reporter for a while, you’ve done reporting on environmental issues for a while. How is this different? The lived experience of this, how has that impacted how you want to tell these stories? Or has it?

Katie Myers:

Yeah, I think it’s negatively impacted my clarity of thought when I’m trying to piece through what to do because I don’t know if I’ve ever reported on a situation like this, where I was in the middle of it. So I’ve been surprised by how overwhelmed I’ve felt at times and I’m just processing this alongside everybody else and you feel like… I was a little bit just driving around and seeing cars and trees and buildings in the road.

Katie Myers:

You just don’t really realize what this disaster can do. And it feels like you’re glimpsing this, I don’t know, divine fury that you weren’t supposed to see or something. It’s just terrifying actually. And so I think there’s that level and then there’s also just I think I found that my reporting has gotten more emotional for me. Even the way that I think I expressed things has just become, more of an emotionally involved process and I think that can make it better. But yeah, it’s just I’m connected to it in a different way.

Whitney Kimball Coe:

There’s a lot to Katie Myers that we could talk about. Thank you so much though for being willing to share details about your experience with the floods and how you’re reporting on them and engaging in some of those questions with me. Really appreciate it.

Katie Myers:

Well, thank you so much and thank you for all your thoughtful questions. They made me reach for all kinds of answers I don’t think I’ve reached for. So thank you.

Whitney Kimball Coe:

Good. Stay tuned up. Up next we talk with Jessica Shelton Shelton, one of the coordinators of EKY Mutual Aid. We’ll be right back after this from the Daily Yonder.

Xandr:

Hi, I’m Xandr Brown with the Daily Yonder. Check out the Yonder Report, weekly podcast rounding up the latest rural news produced by the Daily Yonder and Public News Service. You can listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Whitney Kimball Coe:

And now we bring you another perspective from the flood in Eastern Kentucky. Jessica Shelton Shelton is the director of the Appalachian Media Institute in Whitesburg, Kentucky, where she’s working to build regional power for young Appalachians as media makers and creators of their own narratives. Originally from Floyd County in Eastern Kentucky, Jessica Shelton graduated from the University of Kentucky in 2015 with a degree in media arts and studies.  She’s also an alum of the Governor’s Scholar Program and has a passion for fostering and maintaining local talent. Since the devastating floods that hit 14 counties in Eastern Kentucky in July, 2022, Jessica Shelton has been coordinating the efforts of EKY Mutual Aid or East Kentucky Mutual Aid, which is a community of people working together to address each other’s needs, neighbors helping neighbors without a top down leadership structure.  The EKY Mutual Aid Program began as a Facebook group during the pandemic and has grown from 60 members to now over 5,000 since the flooding. I’m really grateful Jess is here to join us for a bit on today’s Everywhere Radio to tell us more about what recovery efforts look like in Kentucky right now. And to share a little bit about the role Mutual Aid can play during hard times.

Jessica Shelton:

Yeah, thank you for having me Whitney Kimball Coe. And I do want to say I’ve been helping coordinate efforts in Letcher County, but East Kentucky Mutual Aid is very much region wide, and I just have to shout out Misty Skaggs, one of the founders of, or maybe the founder of EKY Mutual Aid in Grayson, Kentucky, because she has been doing this amazing work also since February, 2020.

Whitney Kimball Coe:

Do tell us a little bit about what EKY looks like in Letcher County and tell us a little bit about what Mutual Aid is. This is a big part of your story right now and has been probably throughout these years.

Jessica Shelton:

Yeah, Mutual Aid is really about, I think of it as creating [inaudible 00:19:55] community of care and just sharing skills and services or money with people that need it without expecting anything really in return or knowing that later when you need something they will be there for you. And in Letcher County it’s been me and a group of seven or eight other people that have been coordinating efforts from doing supply deliveries, starting the day after the flood, to raising money through Venmo and PayPal.

Jessica Shelton:

And most recently we’ve been going to people’s homes, mucking out houses, cleaning up in ways that we’re able. We’ve been lucky to have some people come in with contractor experience and have been able to even hang drywall for some people. So it’s really just any monetary need or any, like I said, service. If you have skills as a contractor, then you can provide that for no charge because a lot of people here need that right now as we continue to clean up.

Whitney Kimball Coe:

So it really does sound like the age old way that we do things in small towns, I mean neighbors helping neighbors but at an accelerated rate I imagine. And more concentrated too, so how do people let you know what they need and when they need it? All of those things?

Jessica Shelton:

Yeah. So when the floods first hit, it was the same day. I don’t know that the water had even fully gone down in most of Letcher County yet. I had made an Amazon wishlist and shared it out because I live in town luckily up on a hill, so I was not affected. But if you walk five minutes down the hill, the whole town was underwater and it was like nothing we’d never seen before.

Jessica Shelton:

And I knew that there was going to be so much need. And I had friends that were able to actually get in contact with me out in the county and they were talking to me about how bad it was there. And I don’t think I would’ve been prepared for it until I actually saw it. Well there’s no way to prepare for it, but it was hard for me to believe it until I actually saw what all had happened in places like Neon.

Jessica Shelton:

I had this Amazon wishlist because I knew people were going to need things. But also I knew I couldn’t wait on deliveries from Amazon after we got out there and saw what people needed. And I had a friend, actually, Willa Johnson, who also works at Appalshop, had reached out to me and was like, “You can take things to Neon Volunteer Fire department.” So that’s the first place I went. And I knew places needed water because the water was out in those places and I had some cleaning materials.

Jessica Shelton:

So that was the first place I went. I dropped off cases of water and some cleaning stuff. I had received some donations. I’d put out my personal Venmo at this time. So I’d received some monetary donations. I went out, bought some things and it was like I saw what they had. It wasn’t much. It was just the day after the flood and I think at that point people were still just in shock about what had just happened.

Jessica Shelton:

And driving through, I knew there was exponential need. Driving just through the county, not even on the way to Neon. I knew there was going to be exponential need. So I just started buying supplies with the money that people had donated. Anything from first aid materials, cases of water. It felt like endless cases of water. Hygiene products, especially those that you don’t need water for. Food. Just anything that people need in the every day that they don’t even really think about. It’s just there.

Jessica Shelton:

And that was how we started assessing need. And then as we go along and we were dropping things off at drop off points, it was asking, what do you need? And just being able to be like them telling us we need rooms, we need mops, we need this. And being able to put that out there on social media so other people could see, that was really the way I started to get word out on my own personal social media.

Whitney Kimball Coe:

And now the Facebook group has 5,000 or almost 5,000 members I think. And I was looking at it earlier today and I saw everything from posts just requesting, “Does anybody have a hundred dollars just to help me cover my rent for this month?” To a request for water. It was all kinds of different things. And I noticed in the administrator page it said that, “No questions are asked. Anyone is welcome to make a request here and if we have it, we’ll give it. No questions asked.” And is that an important value or tenant of Mutual Aid in general or is that something that Letcher County has taken on?

Jessica Shelton:

I think it’s an important tenant of Mutual Aid in general. It’s hard for people to ask for help. It’s very hard. And I’ll say also, when we were out giving, at one point we were just giving out cash. $200 and we were driving out in the county in places like Haven in Letcher County that people still couldn’t get out of at the time. And I drove through and just handed out $200 cash to people from donations that we had received.

Jessica Shelton:

And every time I done it, people said, “No, please, I don’t need that.” And I’m like, “You need it. You’ve lost your home, you’ve lost your bridge,” and just saying, “It’s not for me, it’s from Mutual Aid.” And it’s that understanding of, okay, I don’t know that if you ask the average person what is Mutual Aid if they really knew or could give you a definition of that. But I think now here people have more of a general understanding of that.

Jessica Shelton:

But yeah, it’s hard for people to ask for help. So you want to approach it as if you’re asking for help, just know that we are not going to judge you and if we can get it to you, then we will. I think that’s a really, really important understanding for any Mutual Aid group.

Whitney Kimball Coe:

I’m also wondering about how Mutual Aid dovetails with or a company’s more structured services like Federal Aid, State Aid that might be coming. Is it filling in gaps that are missed by those groups or does it apply mostly at the very beginning before FEMA can jump in?

Jessica Shelton:

We’ve definitely been filling gaps here in Letcher County. It takes a really long time for these things to actually get to us, whether it be State Aid or Federal Aid, because there’s so many hoops that people have to jump through, bureaucratic things. So me being able to go the first day after the flood to drop off supplies in Neon or run over to Letcher County is essential, because at that time the National Guard hadn’t come in.

Jessica Shelton:

We hadn’t seen any state figure here either at that time. So really it’s a waiting game. So we’re still filling those gaps that haven’t been able to get to people yet. And I’m hoping that we can do that for as long as it’s needed. And it feels like more of that State and Federal Aid is starting to come, but it’s also, people need to know how to get access to that.

Jessica Shelton:

People need to know who to go, where to go, who to call whenever they need services like that. And I think in the beginning too, we were giving out information. Here’s how you apply for FEMA. The Foundation for Appalachian Kentucky was giving out checks for people, relief checks. And we were helping people sign up for that so they could get money for relief. So it feels like Mutual Aid can be frontline response, but all of these things are very layered and work together.

Jessica Shelton:

But Mutual Aid, I wouldn’t say that we have a lack of structure. We don’t have to jump through the same hoops that the state has to to pass a bill or we don’t have to jump through the same hoops of a 501 C-3 that has to get a bunch of information or get a system set up so they can get relief checks to people. So being able to be on the front lines and having people willing to donate to Mutual Aid to help other people out is totally essential when disasters like this hit.

Whitney Kimball Coe:

Well, thank you, Jess, for your time. Thank you for all the good, beautiful work you’re doing. Our hearts are with you and your community in Eastern Kentucky.

Jessica Shelton:

Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

Whitney Kimball Coe:

Thanks for joining us on this special edition of Everywhere Radio. If you feel moved to pitch in and help the folks in Eastern Kentucky, check out EKY Mutual Aid’s Twitter feed or visit their website at mutualaiddisasterrelief.org for more information.  Everywhere Radio is a production of The Rural Assembly. Our senior producer is Joel Cohen. Associate producers are Teresa Collins and Xandr Brown. And our assistant producer is Anya Slepyan.  And we’re grateful for the love and support from the whole team at Center for Rural Strategies. Love you mean it. You can be anywhere. We’ll be everywhere.