Governor Andy Beshear said the immediate goal is “to get as many people to safety as possible” after what officials have described as unprecedented flooding in the region.
Hundreds of people have been rescued by air and water in recent days by members of the National Guard from Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, as well as officers from the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife and State Police.
“It is very difficult at the moment, with how great the destruction is (and) the areas being affected, to get a landline number of missing persons,” Beshear said, urging residents to report missing persons. to report.
Cellphones are still not available in some provinces and water systems are overloaded, the governor said. A hospital had no water.
“To everyone in Eastern Kentucky, we’ll be there for you today and in the weeks, months and years to come. We’ll get through this together,” Beshear said in a tweet Saturday.
Couple stays in car and promises to help clean up
Clay Nickels and his wife, McKenzie, spoke to DailyExpertNews from their car on Saturday after their home in the town of Neon, Letcher County, was damaged two days ago.
“Our entire family has been counted so far, but we have neighbors who haven’t,” said Clay Nickles.
Nickles described Neon as a close-knit community, “like Mayberry with Andy Griffith.”
“Everyone, whether they are family or not, is like family,” he said. “In an event like this, if one or two people are destroyed, everyone usually helps. In this situation, everyone is devastated.”
Nickles said they will leave their car later to help clean up.
“This is hard, but we will get through this,” Nickles said. “These people were fighters and mountain people have had a lot of heart.”
Deaths have been reported in Knott, Perry, Letcher and Clay counties. Fourteen people, including four children, were confirmed dead in Knott County Friday afternoon, according to the county coroner. It wasn’t immediately clear how that number affects the state’s overall death toll.
The four children were siblings, according to their aunt Brandi Smith, who said the family’s mobile home was inundated by flooding and forced the family to rush to the roof for safety. She added that her sister, Amber, and her partner tried to save their children but were unsuccessful.
“They held them. The water got so strong it just washed them away,” Smith told DailyExpertNews.
Eastern Kentucky is expected to get some relief from heavy rain Saturday. There is a chance of rain from Sunday to Monday, when there is a small risk of excessive rain in the region, according to the Weather Prediction Center. Affected areas may include eastern Tennessee and along the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia.
A whole church gone
The city of Hazard in southeastern Kentucky had seven of the nine bridges impassable, an “unprecedented” number, Mayor Donald “Happy” Mobelini said Friday morning.
Among the swept away buildings is a two-story church, Pastor Peter Youmans told DailyExpertNews on Friday.
“All you see are bits of cement,” Youmans said of his Davidson Baptist Church, and he witnessed flooding that also wiped out a house nearby.
“It started raining so hard it was clearly coming into the parking lot,” he told DailyExpertNews’s Jim Sciutto. “And then it came to our house. Then I knew it was very bad, because it has never been in our house. It was about a foot.’
A small creek in front of Youmans’ home is about 8 or 10 feet wide and normally less than 6 inches deep, but during the flood, trailers moved along the creek, he said.
Parishioners would normally help the church during a time like this, but they “take care of their own problems now,” he noted.
“And some of them are in as bad or worse shape than we are,” he said. “We’re just thankful the house wasn’t destroyed with my grandchildren in it.”
‘I’m still a little traumatized’
Meanwhile, in Perry County, Joseph Palumbo struggles to reach his home after another house was washed up on a road along the way, blocking access.
“We’re walking to the end of our driveway and an entire double-wide trailer has crashed into our bridge,” Palumbo told DailyExpertNews on Friday. The trailer had been standing across Highway 28 from his own home for decades, he said.
“I’m still a little traumatized because I’ve never seen anything like it in my life,” Palumbo said.
And because the trailer ended up on a small bridge over a creek, he and his girlfriend, Danielle Langdon, can’t walk around it.
“We’re climbing a ladder, scaling over a tin roof, mud everywhere,” Palumbo said. “The first day we slide over the tin roof to get to the other side.”
The resident of the destroyed home was not inside at the time of the flood and escaped the storm unharmed.
“I have friends I haven’t seen in years who reach out to me,” Palumbo said. “It’s heartwarming to see how people help each other.”
DailyExpertNews’s Jalen Beckford, Raja Razek, Amy Simonson, Derek Van Dam, Joe Johns, Caroll Alvarado, Amanda Musa, Claudia Dominguez, Elizabeth Wolfe, Theresa Waldrop and Lauren Lee contributed to this report.