Up to 16 inches of rain fell from July 26 to 29, sometimes as heavily as 4 inches per hour.
Using satellite photos, scientists have documented the correlation, showing how the most heavily strip-mined region of the Ohio River Basin was also the area most threatened by extreme weather related to climate change, Inside Climate News reported in the fall of 2019.įor residents of eastern Kentucky last summer, the flooding was worse than ever, contributing to at least 44 deaths. People who live in the coal country of eastern Kentucky and elsewhere in Central Appalachia have long observed a link between what local residents call “strip jobs” and increased flooding that sometimes sweeps away homes and people during storms.
“No, not in and of itself, but it does raise more questions that need to be answered and the need for a more formal investigation.” “Does this show causation?” May said of the map. The letter asks the federal government to determine whether the nation’s nearly 50-year-old law governing strip-mining needs to be reformed. She and other volunteers for Kentuckians for the Commonwealth (KFTC), a social justice nonprofit, hope Interior Secretary Deb Haaland reaches the same conclusion when she reviews the interactive map and studies a letter KFTC sent Monday to Haaland and other federal officials. “I hope anyone who looks at the map will have the same reaction.” “It was pretty chilling to see the location of the deaths, and to follow up a stream and see these large-scale mines at the head of the hollows,” May said after a news conference with reporters. These devastated landscapes, sometimes abandoned without adequate reclamation and with sediment-choked retention ponds that cannot hold runoff, produced what some victims have described as a “rapid tidal wave” of water that seemed to have trapped some and left others scrambling for higher ground.
Virtually all of them occurred downstream from large-scale strip mines at the head of mountain hollows. When public health nurse Beverly May plotted the locations of 36 drowning deaths from last summer’s torrential rains in eastern Kentucky, she felt a chill.
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