According to data, inland counties dominate the list of disasters, yet hurricanes and earthquakes make headlines.

According to data, inland counties dominate the list of disasters, yet hurricanes and earthquakes make headlines.

Floyd County floods often, and the federal government responds to save the day.

A county in eastern Kentucky flooded in July 2022, resulting in 300 homes being damaged and at least 40 fatalities. It was the rural county’s thirteenth federal disaster declaration in twelve years. The governor petitions the president to declare a disaster, freeing up federal funding, because these are so expensive that local governments believe they cannot afford to cover the full cost of the damage.

Judge Robbie Williams, the administrator for the county with slightly over 35,000 residents, recalls, “After that flood I had 500 homeless people looking at me, ‘Judge what are we going to do’?” “It’s daunting, and the next time it occurs is only a matter of time.”

Yes, it did. Floyd County was once again designated a disaster in 2023, marking the fourteenth time since 2011. Furthermore, Floyd County is not even the most disaster-prone county in the country. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has declared fifteen disasters in neighboring Johnson County since 2011.

People typically assume that the coasts that are vulnerable to hurricanes or earthquakes are the places where danger lies when it comes to extreme weather and other so-called natural catastrophes. Rebuild by Design and New York University built an atlas of 713 FEMA certified disasters, and it turns out that’s not where the biggest concentration of federally declared disasters is. While the majority of people after disasters consider the federal government providing financial assistance to specific victims to cover the cost of damaged homes and companies, the atlas concentrates on

Eight of the nine counties with the most federal declared disasters since 2011 — more than a dozen each — are in Kentucky, with one in Vermont. These counties have four to five times the number of disaster as the national average of three in the past 13 years.

“California and Louisiana and I would say now even Texas, Florida, for sure, they soak up all the oxygen when you hear about these giant storms,” said atlas creator Amy Chester, director of the disaster prevention-focused Rebuild By Design nonprofit group. “But what you’re not hearing about are these storms that are happening all the time, and that’s just becoming like, regular to places like Vermont.”

Chester also mentioned Tennessee, Oklahoma, Missisippi, Iowa and Alaska as hotspots.

“We want to show that climate change is already here,” Chester said of the data covers 2011 to 2023, but doesn’t include heat waves, drought or covid. “Communities are suffering all over.”