'People need to know.' Clean-up begins in Eastern Kentucky after historic flooding
Drake Wright’s parrot, his eagle and even his dinosaur were the lucky ones.
Flooding had destroyed seemingly everything else the young boy owned.
As I stood in the child’s bedroom, those stuffed animals sat eerily unscathed on the top bunk of his bed in Letcher County. Overnight Thursday, water began rising in 13 counties in Eastern Kentucky. It reached the Wrights' home in Whitesburg at about 5:30 a.m. and paralyzed the community of about 1,800 people for 12 hours. At least two people in Letcher County have died. At minimum 25 people were killed and roughly 300 victims were rescued across the region between Thursday and Friday.
Live updates on Kentucky flooding: Weekend updates from Eastern Kentucky: Death toll rises past 20 amid flood recovery efforts
By the time I arrived in Whitesburg Friday morning, watermarks from the flood’s wrath were still evident in Drake's soaked mattress and on the disheveled blankets on his bottom bunk. You could see the flood's angry footprints in the way the door to the boy's bedroom buckled in from the floor to the doorknob and in how liquid mud pooled over shoes, clothes, and waterlogged sporting equipment.
"Do you want to come into our house," Drake’s mother, Casey Wright, had asked me minutes before as I stood on the lawn with her, a mud-riddled X-box, a saturated armchair, a mangled lamp and seemingly every piece of furniture that once welcomed people comfortably in her living room.
"People need to know," she said.
I spent the better part of Friday morning trying to figure out how to put into words exactly what Casey Wright wanted the world to see.
This historic flooding obliterated the places where these people felt safest, and there's no denying that hearts are broken and many families are filled with grief in Eastern Kentucky. That pain is real and indisputable.
But at the same time, I didn't see a single tear among the dozens of people I spoke to and saw during the first full day of clean-up.
I saw brows filled with sweat and hands caked with mud. I watched family and friends rally around victims who'd seemingly lost everything and now had the cruel task of cleaning up what was left.
There was so much work that had to be done, and it had to be done now.
As photographer Pat McDonogh and I drove through the mountains just after breakfast Friday, splatters of mud where water had raged just hours before littered the roads. Vegetation and trash clung to the fences almost as though it was woven there on purpose with stray gloves, a pair of jeans, a bag of tortillas, and even a plastic fork gripping onto leaves like odd ornaments on a Christmas greenery.
Whitesburg, KY, faces the damage
The closer we got to Whitesburg, the thicker the storm's muddy trail and the more menacing the debris became.
We parked our car behind the Appalshop at 91 Madison Ave. first because social media buzzed late Thursday with the news that flooding had hit the famed archive. The nationally known nonprofit started as a film workshop in 1969 and operates now as radio station, a theater, a public art gallery, a record label, an archive and a filmmaking institute, among other missions. Even though waters had waned by early Friday, it was unclear how much damage there was inside this Eastern Kentucky gem.
Elizabeth Barret, one of the archivists, and her husband Herby Smith greeted us in the parking lot and told us they still hadn't been able to get in the door to check on the damage. Much of the archive is stored in a climate-controlled vault, and they were hopeful it had survived.
"In some ways, the long-term understanding of how this region's history unfolded is in that archive," Smith said. "All the film that was shot, all the recordings, still photographs that tell the true story of life, without it, it’s a big loss."
As we said farewell to the couple and rounded the corner toward the sidewalk, my eyes darted toward a strange tangle of black ribbons that had clung to a telephone pole and wound its way down the street.
“Pat, is that film?" I asked, puzzled.
And sure enough, hundreds of feet of film had uncoiled from spools and were caught among fragments of photographs, newspapers and documents. Appalshop had been preserving mountain history for more than 50 years and I wondered if in a matter of hours a single flood had washed it all away.
About a half hour later we ran into Smith and Barret, again, and they put some of that fear to rest. They believed that the films lining the streets were copies from offsite storage and not from the archive itself.
Desolate storefronts dot Madison Street
We continued on foot along Madison Street past Kentucky Mist Distillery where workers were sweeping out mud from an entrance. From there we turned onto East Main Street, and even though I hadn't seen the storm, I could tell where the water had been inside the second-hand shop Grace Closet. A dress form holding a light pink shirt, pearls, and a hot pink purse served as the flood line. The shirt's neckline and the pearls hung beautifully unharmed while dark mud took over the garment just at the waist.
More:Drone footage shows flood damage in Whitesburg, Kentucky
Floodwaters had tossed benches, blown out glass doors and windows and ripped fence posts from the ground, complete with their concrete anchors. I spotted a red and blue barbershop flag weeping mud from its pole as water-stained barber chairs lingered outside. Kevin Brown, whose father owns the business, was carrying a table out of the shop and across the street when I met him. He explained between heavy breaths and beads of sweat that he'd woken up at 6 a.m. to the sound of his father pounding at the door.
Brown was lucky. His house sits on the high ground, but as much as four feet of water had flooded into the family business, Cut Away Barber and Beauty. His dad's home had six inches of water in it, and one of the rental properties he owned was completely destroyed. He usually cuts hair in this building, but Brown had been cleaning up whatever he could inside the shop since 7 a.m.
Seemingly every storefront had exhausted groups of workers and volunteers moving furniture out to the curb and mopping whatever muck they could out the door. By mid-morning, the sidewalks of the cozy downtown looked like a mangled, waterlogged flea market.
The more we talked to people downtown, the more we learned that the devastation went well beyond the business district.
So we took Pat's car to the west part of town where townsfolk had told us that oil tanker trucks had been knocked from their rigs. Sure enough, they sat tangled like monster-sized pick-up sticks across the lot.
Upper Bottom neighborhood
From there we followed the mud-saturated roads to the Upper Bottom neighborhood where we found a shed teetering on its side as though someone had balanced it like a lopsided top. Nearby, a trampoline had been tossed into a grove of trees as though someone had thrown gum against the wall.
This, for the record, is the neighborhood where I met Drake Wrights' family. The Wrights were kind enough to invite me inside, but make no mistake, every other house on that street was equally devastated.
Most homes had seen at least four to five feet of water in them and others had been submerged in the flooding all the way up to the roofs. Water had worked its way into refrigerators and spoiled vegetables and meat, and into pantries overtaking boxes of dry goods like rice, pasta and cereal. The water rose up along the sides of wooden and plastic dresser drawers and drenched T-shirts, socks and undergarments. In garages, sheds and closets the storm flooded the motors on tools like drills, saws, and even vacuums. Just about anything these people owned that could have helped with the clean-up had been lost to the storm, too.
As I watched the neighbors unload their lives onto their lawns, Jerry Sornett greeted us outside of his home with a story of how he waded out of his home to safety in thigh-high water at about 7:30 a.m. He found a spot on the hill overlooking his neighborhood and watched the whole flood from that perch.
As soon as the water allowed, he waded back 10 hours later and started the clean-up.
Sornett and his neighbors had to work fast.
The sooner all the furniture was out and the drywall was removed, the less chance there was that mold would take over the house and cause an entirely different kind of disaster. One man had a nephew drive in from Louisville to lend a set of hands. Another had a son, who'd woken up at 4 a.m., and traveled all the way from Savannah, Georgia to help.
Chris James, who is Drake Wright's uncle, lives in Letcher County, but he had been in Knoxville working when the storm hit. He tried to come straight home, but road closures took what should have been a three-hour trip and turned it into an eight-and-a-half-hour journey.
As I stood on the lawn with his family, James had a very clear message to share. If he could make it here, through all of that, certainly, some government aid should have been here by now.
"Where is the Red Cross," he asked me, shaking his head. "Where is the water? Where is all the stuff that we’ve been promised? People need it."
A church group had been in Thursday night after the flood receded, and they'd given the neighborhood some supplies, he told me. Beyond that generosity, though, they'd largely been left to clean up the destruction on their own.
By lunchtime, a van of volunteers parked on the street and provided meals to the flood victims. I saw another woman hand a bucket and some cleaning supplies to one household. I wondered how just a couple of liters of disinfectant could clean up homes that this time the day before had been filled with more murky water than could fit in a standard swimming pool.
It would be like trying to tidy up a glass of spilled milk with a Q-tip.
As I was thinking about this, John Honeycutt, who owns a two-story house with its own courtyard, waved at me kindly and introduced himself to us.
"Nice house," Pat told him.
“It used to be, and it will be again,” Honeycutt replied.
KY flooding: See photos from the historic flooding that devastated Eastern Kentucky region in late July
He had mud-covered work gloves on, but invited me to scroll through the pictures on his phone as we spoke. Honeycutt had walked out of his house at 5:30 a.m. on Thursday and saw water up to his tires.
When he returned minutes later with his keys and a cup of coffee, the water had climbed up to the door.
By the end of the storm, the flood would total more than a half dozen vehicles on his property, including a 1972 Mercedes that his brother-in-law had just restored. Honeycutt had stayed on the second floor of his house as the water busted through his front windows and inched up the walls in his living rooms. He watched two men in a kayak rescue his sister-in-law from her single-story home across the street. As I swiped through the pictures, I found a video of her climbing into the kayak. A few frames later, I saw a photo of her entire house under the water except the peak of the roof.
As we talked, a woman drove by in a rescue vehicle. She goaded Honeycutt for staying put the day before while most everyone else evacuated.
"Don’t you point that finger at me," he said, smiling.
He'd stayed in his house throughout the storm, and slept on the dry top floor of his home Thursday evening into Friday. He'd turned off the power on the main floor, and was able to rest in the upstairs bedroom while the mess waited for him below.
"I still have water," he told me, which was an unexpected blessing. "So I’m not going to complain."
And really, no one I met Friday did.
Eastern Kentucky residents need help
There was too much work to be done to complain, and there were too many things to be grateful for amid the disaster. Almost everyone I spoke with Friday morning was quick to tell me that they knew someone else who had come out of the storm much worse than they had. They were acutely aware that others had not come out of it at all.
And later that afternoon, that’s what I thought about as we drove away from the smears of mud and lawns full of ruin.
I remembered what Casey Wright told me just before my feet slushed around in the mud on the floor, as I stared at those dry stuffed animals on the top bunk of her son's bed.
People need to know that the need is great in Eastern Kentucky. There are so many families without water, power, and supplies. People need to know the mess is unthinkable, and it's not going to go away tomorrow, next week, or even next month. They are doing their best, but they need help and resources. This job is just too big to imagine.
How to help: Want to help those affected by Kentucky flooding? Here's what you can donate and where
But they also need to know that the people who live in the mountains are incredibly resilient.
I saw that first-hand as they shoveled out mud, carried out furniture, and began ripping out drywall the day after the flood destroyed everything they had. There was no time to mourn.
It will take an incredible amount of work and help to restore these Eastern Kentucky communities to what they were before the water hit on Thursday.
That’s what people need to know.
Features columnist Maggie Menderski writes about what makes Louisville, Southern Indiana and Kentucky unique, wonderful, and occasionally, a little weird. If you've got something in your family, your town or even your closet that fits that description — she wants to hear from you. Say hello at mmenderski@courier-journal.com or 502-582-4053. Follow along on Instagram and Twitter @MaggieMenderski.
This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: After Kentucky flooding, residents begin clean-up the day after
