Flooding, Hope in Eastern Kentucky
HINDMAN, KY. — Flooding isn’t that uncommon to those of us who grew up in Eastern Kentucky. But there is something unnatural about the deluge that hit the mountains in a storm that started on July 26.
Tuesday, I went with a group of women to Hindman Settlement School in Knott County to volunteer to assist with flood and recovery damage. This is a sketch of what I observed.
The devastation is extensive and surreal. Clothing hanging from treetops. Long expanses of metal twisted like a pretzel and entwined in a guardrail. Home after home with its entire contents in the front yard, from beds and dressers to piles of mud-caked clothing. Rivers and creeks dammed with small sticks, large trees, parts of a house, chunks of a car, kids' toys and a piece of plywood, all crashed into a bridge.
Even the gas station where we stopped could only sell gas with a credit card because the entire interior of the store had been stripped to the studs and was about to be drywalled.
Even though I grew up south of Knott County, I have known Hindman Settlement School since the mid-1980s, when I was a newspaper reporter for the Lexington Herald-Leader in its Hazard…
