In Kentucky, Disaster Rides the River

Bob Scott can read the river that runs by his door. He can tell by its gurgle, by its shifting colors and ebb and flow what it wants to do. The river, he says, has a mood, like a person, and if you’re a mountain man, you can pretty much tell on any given day whether the river means you harm or intends to pass you by.

As the rain pounded down early this week and the muddied Clover Fork rose, rushing past to join the headwaters of the Cumberland River behind the Dairy Queen in Harlan, a few miles away, Scott discerned no threat. He had seen the river angrier, in the floods of 1964 and ’77 and ‘82, so he and his mother restocked the shelves of their Yo Yo Market and waited for the rain to stop and the river to recede.

“This time I misread it,” Scott, 46, said Friday, surveying the ruins of his market and the five trailer homes he rents out. “I’d never seen the Clover Fork come up so quick. In 30 minutes, the water was ankle deep, in an hour, knee-deep. It kept going from there.”

Harlan County dump trucks already had hauled away five loads of destroyed food stuffs and furniture from the building. Scott stepped aside to make room for a bulldozer pulling a refrigerator out the door. His eyes filled with tears when he looked inside the slime-caked apartment he had built for his mother at one end of the market. There was nothing but memories to salvage.

“I lost $200,000 here, easy,” he said. “But it’s not just the money. It’s having everything torn away from you, knowing you got to start over. At least that’s something we’re good at in the mountain hollows--starting over. We’ve had practice.”

Hillbilly Life Not for the Timid

The flood of 2002 was bad--some say the worst in 25 years--but it doesn’t rank among the gravest to strike the coal mining towns of Appalachia, where disaster and poverty are the companions of a stoic people. “You have to be tough to be a coal miner and hillbilly,” one miner said. “And proud too. You go on.” And, like the Scotts, start over. Again.

Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia and Virginia took the brunt of the storm, which dropped 5 inches of rain on Harlan County in 36 hours. Seven people died in the four-state area, including three in a traffic accident that Tennessee authorities blamed on the rain. Nearly 1,000 homes were damaged or destroyed, and scores of bridges were washed out.

Kentucky Gov. Paul E. Patton and Virginia Gov. Mark Warner have asked President Bush to declare parts of their states disaster areas. Federal teams have been sent to determine what assistance is needed, and local church and civic organizations have dispatched crews of volunteers to help families clean up their homes.

Like much of Appalachia, the little communities around Harlan in southeast Kentucky flirt with disaster every time there is a hard rain. The mountains, laced with coal seams and logging and mining sites, send torrents of water gushing into the hollows and valleys where people live. The streams and rivers overflow their banks, and the sludge- and branch-laden waters tear through the hamlets like bulldozers.

“Course there’s no way I could prove this,” said Burl Fee, the mayor of Evarts, “but you have to think logging and strip mining has a big effect on making the damage we see in this storm.

“Look around you. They’ve logged these mountains bare. They’ll tear up 10 or 12 trees to get one good oak or poplar. There’s nothing left to hold the water back. These are poor people to begin with, and they’re left poorer. I did a survey a while back, and of the 1,300 people in town, 293 are living on fixed incomes of $500 a month or less.”

The Army Corps of Engineers has been working for a decade on a flood control project to harness the Cumberland River, which flows from Harlan to Nashville. Concrete barrier walls have been built, tributaries diverted, floodgates and culverts constructed, pumps installed.

“We started pumping at the station at 2 a.m. the morning after the rains started,” said Nick Rouse, Harlan County’s flood plains coordinator. “They worked perfectly. If it wasn’t for the pumps, the damage would have been much greater. I can guarantee you, Harlan city would have been flooded without the pumps.”

The force of the flood waters that ripped chest-high through Tana Dillman’s mobile home tore her bathtub from the floor. It emptied her closets and cabinets, leaving packages of bacon and macaroni, shoes and shirts and her three children’s toys buried in 6 inches of mud. About all she managed to escape with were some family pictures and clothes.

“I came back at dawn and cried when I saw what was left,” she said. “I was saving up to buy the trailer, but I can’t move back now. Not with that odor. Not with the mud. But I’m feeling better today. We moved in with family. The kids are safe. We only lost a home, and you can replace that.”