Officials in Kentucky and West Virginia have ignored plans that could have mitigated the damage from recent floods

Cleaning out in Fleming-Neon, Ky. (Photo by Justin Hicks, Ohio Valley Resource)

Officials in Kentucky and West Virginia repeatedly ignored plans to prepare for catastrophic floods like those that hit Central Appalachia in late July, Alexa Beyer reports for Mountain State Spotlight.

"West Virginia has had a comprehensive flood mitigation plan on the books since 2004, though officials have taken little concrete action to implement it," Beyer writes. "And in Kentucky, extensive regional plans spell out how communities could decrease the potential for flood damage. In these cases, planning and taking action haven’t gone hand in hand." West Virginia's plan "was loaded with actionable suggestions on floodplain and wastewater management, ordinance enforcement, better flood warning systems, improved building codes, and a tougher approach to resource extraction. Yet it was never implemented by any of the state agencies that would have had jurisdiction over parts of the plan."

In Kentucky, there is no effective statewide plan. The state delegates disaster mitigation planning to counties and cities, "which in theory allows communities to tailor their plans to their specific needs," Beyer writes. "In practice, most municipalities in turn delegate disaster planning to regional area development districts." The state has 15 of those, 120 counties and 4.5 million people.

Bill Haneberg, director of the Kentucky Geological Survey, told Beyer that there is no coordinated effort to prevent flooding in the state: “There are people in state government in our Division of Water, for example, who do work on flooding, but there’s no really highly concentrated intense statewide effort.”

Longtime Letcher County Surveyor Richard Hall told Beyer, “This is just the truth in Appalachia right here. … We have never followed the rules in Appalachia.” Hall "ensures structures built within the floodplain comply with local codes in his current role, but he had no knowledge of the county’s flood mitigation plan. Neither did the county’s flood coordinator nor the 911 director." And Letcher County was one of the hardest hit in the latest flood.

"Nearly five years after the Kentucky River Area Development District made its five-year plan recommending two action items for the [Letcher County] town of Fleming-Neon, officials hadn’t made any progress on one of them: moving City Hall out of the flood plain. Mayor Susan Polis said she didn’t recall it being something they planned to do," Beyer reports. "Calls to dozens of emergency management officials for cities and counties in Eastern Kentucky hit by the most recent flood revealed that most did not know what their local flood mitigation plan was, or that their area development district was the entity that had made it."