VisCenter: Coal Mining In Kentucky (Full 57 minute Documentary)
Louisville Courier Journal
written by Caleb Stultz
Thursday July 28, 2022
The Eastern Kentucky flooding has done more than destroy homes, it has also ripped apart family members. If you have a loved one missing after the flooding, contact the Kentucky State Police.
"If it's busy, keep calling. Hate to ask you to do that, but they are getting a lot of calls because of what they do and the amount of damage that is out here," Gov. Andy Beshear said.
Asked Friday how many people are missing, Beshear said it was too difficult to say at this point.
More than 20 people have been rescued from their homes. Jesse Elbouab, the executive staff adviser with the Kentucky National Guard's Public Affairs Office.
According to a release from the Kentucky State Police, if you need to report a missing person, you must call the appropriate phone number below to get the fastest response:
- Breathitt, Perry, Knott, Letcher or Leslie counties: Contact Post 13 Hazard at 606-435-6069.
- Magoffin, Johnson, Martin, Floyd or Pike counties: Contact Post 9 Pikeville at 606-433-7711.
- Jackson, Owsley or Lee counties: Contact Post 7 Richmond at 859-623-2404.
- Wolfe or Morgan counties: Contact Post 8 Morehead at 606-784-4127.
- Harlan County: Contact Post 10 Harlan at 606-573-3131.
Sky News published July 30, 2022: Over 25 killed in Kentucky flooding. The governor of Kentucky has warned it could take weeks to find all the victims from this week's flooding after at least 25 people were killed.
ABC News published July 30, 2022: Death toll rises to 25 in Kentucky flooding. Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear said the number is "likely to increase."
ABC News published July 29, 2022: Death toll rises after historic flooding in Kentucky. ABC News’ Mola Lenghi discusses the latest on the deadly flooding as President Biden declares a major disaster.
ABC News
written by Emily Shapiro and Nadine El-Bawab
Saturday July 30, 2022
Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear said 25 people have been confirmed dead across 5 counties in the state's devastating flooding, as of 11 a.m. on Saturday, saying the number is "likely to increase."
"That number will continue to grow and to be refined. Remember we don't have cell service in some areas so please be patient as we get new information or if it changes," Beshear said during a press conference Saturday.
Beshear said the state can now confirm only four children are dead in the flooding, after he had said on Friday that he learned six children's' bodies had been recovered.
"If there is one piece of good news, we now believe there are only four children in this group, and not six. The additional two children that were reported to us have turned out to be adults. Now, those are still two people who we have lost and we grieve for them," Beshear said.
There are more than 18,000 power outages being reported. Power should be restored in Johnson, Magoffin and Martin counties by Saturday night, 95% restored in Floyd and Pike Counties by Sunday night and restored into next week for Breathitt, Knott, Letcher and Perry counties, Beshear said.
Beshear said this is still an emergency situation, and the state is still in search and rescue mode, saying the information is going to change as officials learn more.
"We don't lose this many people in flooding. This is a real tough one," Beshear said.
"We continue to pray for the families that have suffered an unfathomable loss. Some having lost almost everyone in their household," Beshear said.
As of Saturday morning, the Kentucky National guard had rescued 404 people over the last couple of days via aircraft. The Tennessee National Guard, which has been helping with the recovery, has rescued 224 additional people and the West Virginia National Guard has rescued 36 people, according to Beshear.
The state's national guard has rescued 19 people and two dogs by boat, Beshear said. Kentucky police has assisted or are assisting in 624 water rescues and the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife has assisted in 125 water rescues, according to Beshear.
"It is a really hard thing right now with how wide the destruction is in areas that are impacted to get any firm number on people that are missing," Beshear said, asking people to report missing people.
Beshear said the river water is down 10 feet, and officials are no longer concerned that the Pambula Lake Dam, where they thought there may be a breach.
On Friday, Beshear said "a lot of people" remain unaccounted for.
"We're going to do our best to find them all," Beshear said, without providing a number of the missing.
Beshear toured the devastation by helicopter on Friday and called it the worst flooding he's seen since being in office.
The governor anticipated that authorities may be updating the number of deceased for "several weeks."
On Thursday, Beshear called it "one of the worst, most devastating" floods in the state's history and said he anticipates this will be one of the deadliest floods in Kentucky in "a very long time."
The flooding hit Kentucky late Wednesday, pounding the state with 2 to 5 inches of rain.
Kentucky is combating washed out roads, destroyed homes and flooded schools, according to the governor.
Thousands of residents are expected to lose their homes, he said.
More than 294 people have been rescued from floodwaters in eastern Kentucky so far and that number will likely rise, Beshear said.
The rain may return to Kentucky late Sunday through early next week, but significant rainfall isn't expected.
"While rain totals are not expected to be as high, flooding still remains a concern due to saturated grounds," the governor tweeted.
President Joe Biden approved a disaster declaration and is receiving updates "very regularly," White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Friday.
"Our hearts break for the families of those who have lost their lives or are missing, and to all those who have been impacted," she said.
A relief fund set up by the state has garnered $684,688.09 in donations, Beshear said. The first expenditure out of the fund will be paying for funerals, he said.
"We care about you and we can't imagine the grief you are going through right now," Beshear said, addressing those impacted.
WLWT published July 28, 2022: Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear called it "one of the worst, most devastating flooding events in Kentucky's history" in an update Thursday morning.
An 81-year-old has lived there his entire life and has never seen anything like this devastating flash flood. Sadly, this senior lost his home and his dog. :( (emphasis mine)
So many on here lecturing me about how my people live off them. No. Appalachia has fueled this country since the beginning. With timber, coal, gas, our children, our lives. We keep getting pushed down and we keep getting back up. #EasternKentuckyStrong #AppalachianProud
— Silas House (@silasdhouse) July 30, 2022
We’ve fueled America with our music, our literature, our hearts and souls. Children are dead. People have lost everything. Stop the ignorant and malicious rhetoric.
— Silas House (@silasdhouse) July 30, 2022
WHAS11 published July 16, 2021: GDL: Discover Harlan County: Portal 31 Coal Mine. Portal 31 is located in Lynch, KY. To schedule a deep mine tour, call 606-848-3131. Real coal mine with animatronics.
bopro published Abandoned Coal Harlan Country Kentucky. Lynch KY coal mines. Interviews with story tellers giving information about the history of the area.
bopro published Abandoned Coal Lynch Kentucky Segment Featuring Paul Browning. Diving into the history of the Kentucky coal mines and immagrants who came to work and build a life in Eastern Kentucky. Harlan Country is rich with stories and sights never before seen until now.
Lexington Herald Leader
written by Bill Estep and Austin Horn
Saturday July 30, 2022
A good bit of Appalachian history and arts got soaked in the record flooding in Eastern Kentucky. In Whitesburg, water may have breached the vault at Appalshop, where the arts and media collective stored more than 20,000 items, including decades worth of film, oral histories, videotapes of musical performances, photo collections and other records. Driven by rainfall of eight inches or more in places in just a few hours, the North Fork of the Kentucky River in Whitesburg swelled to more than six feet above the old record flood, inundating downtown.
“Some of the film from Appalshop was all through the streets and everything,” said Austin Caudill, 24, who lives downtown. “We could lose not just businesses but history.”
In neighboring Knott County, Troublesome Creek gushed out of its banks and flooded buildings at another institution that seeks to preserve and further traditional Appalachian culture, the Hindman Settlement School.
High water damaged the administrative offices, housing and classroom spaces, a historic cabin and the school’s archives, said the executive director of the school, Mike Anderson.
The archive collection included books, dulcimers, photos, old newspapers and handwritten journals from local residents recounting life in the mountainous coal county.
Staffers saved the musical instruments, but it’s likely some of the archival materials can’t be salvaged, Anderson said Saturday.
“I think that’s the biggest heartbreak of this whole thing,” Anderson said.
DAMAGE AT APPALACHIAN SCHOOL OF LUTHIERY
Water also reached a depth of more than three feet in Appalachian School of Luthiery near the settlement school in downtown Hindman, which trains people in substance-abuse recovery to make stringed instruments such as dulcimers.
Paul Williams, 65, who taught at the school, said when he stopped in on Thursday, the first day of the flood, he just looked around, cried and left.
“I couldn’t stand it,” he said.
He was back on Friday to look through the damage. His fiddle was still missing, but some friends’ fiddles were there, and he found a carved headstock for a mandolin he’d been working on.
A local man stopped in to mourn the loss of the trove of beautiful, handcrafted instruments, and asked about a guitar with a birdseye maple neck he’d had his eye on.
“It’s probably still here,” Williams said, pointing to a room with a mass of tangled wood. “I just don’t know what kind of condition it’s in.”
Next to the settlement school, flooding damaged the Troublesome Creek Stringed Instrument Co., including its factory, sand many valuable instruments, said Bill Weinberg, who in on the board.
The company employs more than a dozen people in making dulcimers, guitars and mandolins. The office manager set up a GoFundMe account for donations.
“I’m just astounded they got the damage they did,” he said. “It’s a mess.”
ARCHIVES ARE A “TREASURE”
Appalshop was established in 1969 to train young people in film-making, improve the economy and provide a contrary narrative to negative stereotypes about the region.
It has evolved in more than 50 years to include a record label, a theater, a radio station, a solar project and community development work, but a key part of the mission remains to “document, disseminate, and revitalize the lasting traditions and contemporary creativity of Appalachia.”
The materials in its archives cover nearly a century of life and work in the region, according to Appalshop, including coal mining, labor strikes, religious practices, out-migration, farming, traditional folk arts, musicians, storytellers, politics, and environmental activism.
Dee Davis, who worked at Appalshop for 25 years and whose wife, filmmaker Mimi Pickering, works there, called the archive “precious cargo” in an NPR interview this week.
“That’s — those are the stories of miners and quilters and people who have built this place and learned the lessons the hard way,” said Davis, now president of Center for Rural Strategies. “And it’s really important information. And it’s a treasure.”
Caroline Rubens, director of the archive, said the vault was likely breached by water.
“It’s probably all wet up to a certain point,” she said.
One of her particular concerns was extra footage from published documentaries that didn’t make it into the final film.
“For every documentary that Appalshop made, there are hours and hours of footage that was shot. We have interviews with musicians, artisans, politicians; everyday local residents talking about what they care about or what makes them angry,” Rubens said. “They’ve got people talking about social justice issues, their love for this place and the region, how it can be painful to see themselves misrepresented – a lot of those voices are in there.”
Rubens said those voices can help change the narrative about an Appalachian culture that has often been misunderstood and badly portrayed. Preserving those items is what drew her to the profession and this place, she said.
She said the final cuts for many of Appalshop’s films have been backed up physically and are in storage, but much of the other material in the archive had not been preserved digitally.
A former Appalshop staffer offered to round up high-grade dehumidifiers to help salvage material. Ten were on the way, Rubens said Friday.
On Saturday, Meredith Scalos, spokeswoman for the organization, said staffers were still assessing the archive contents and wouldn’t likely know the extent of the damage for some time.
STAFFERS RUSH TO HELP HINDMAN SETTLEMENT SCHOOL
Hindman Settlement School was founded in 1902 to provide education in what was then an isolated spot in the mountains.
It was among a collection of settlement schools, mission schools and academies, some secular and some church-run, set up in Appalachia in the late 1800s and early 1900s to educate children at a time when public schools were scarce or hard to reach for many kids.
Improved roads and the spread of public education ultimately reduced the need for such places.
Hindman Settlement School stopped boarding students in 1980, but it and some others, including Pine Mountain Settlement School in nearby Harlan County, adapted with new programs.
Hindman Settlement School, for instance, provides dyslexia education for young people and hosts the celebrated Appalachian Writers’ Workshop.
It also has a writing program for high-school students; operates a literary imprint in partnership with the University Press of Kentucky to tell Appalachian stories by people in the region; and provides folk-arts education in schools and an after-school program to teach old-time music to young people.
The school overlooks Troublesome Creek, but is on higher ground and had never suffered significant flooding in its 120 history, said Anderson, the executive director.
“You just can’t imagine the water getting this high,” he said.
Water reached a depth of five feet in the office of the school.
The wife of an employee fell and broke her leg as as she and others tried to get to campus buildings on the hillside above the creek, Anderson said, and 12 cars owned by participants in the workshop were swept away.
Staffers Josh Mullins and Sarah Kate Morgan tried to save items, grabbing computers as the water rose quickly, but they didn’t have time to carry boxes of items out of the archives.
Four instruments got wet, but employees dried them. Anderson said it appears they will be okay.
The school sees its mission as serving the community, and it was doing that Saturday. Volunteers were handing out water and the school was providing housing and meals for 30 people whose homes were damaged or destroyed, with more expected, Anderson said.
As for the archives, it’s unlikely that decades worth of soggy newspapers can be saved, and the school may lose some historical books that can’t be replaced, Anderson said.
But Anderson, a photographer, said he believed photos from the archives can be cleaned and saved.
Materials from the archives were still in wet storage boxes on Saturday. That was on purpose; removing papers and photos could make them stick together as they started to dry.
SOAKED MATERIALS TO BE FROZEN TO HELP SAVE THEM
Saturday, people were loading boxes of archival material to take to Eastern Tennessee University, which has a freezer to keep them in — to keep them from molding — and resources to help save them, Anderson said.
For materials that wouldn’t fit on the truck, the plan was to have volunteers familiar with saving flood-damaged records take them.
The state Department of Libraries and Archives had provided advice on putting documents in freezers to prevent them from molding and dry them, Anderson said.
Anderson said the soaked storage boxes will have to be broken apart to get materials out without damaging them.
Anderson said the school had flood insurance, but it’s not clear if it will cover all the losses. The school has set up a page for donations.
What’s not in doubt is that the school will clean up and get back in business, Anderson said.
“We haven’t lost the spirit and the desire to serve our community,” he said. “I think there is a love of this organization. I don’t think people will let it fade away.”
We are in urgent need of a rental or loaner refrigerator truck for the Appalshop Archive recovery. We need to secure one ASAP in the next 24-48 hours. If you have leads on a refrigerator truck we may use, please email roger@appalshop.org with the details and amplify as you can. pic.twitter.com/f84wcGWuYC
— Appalshop (@Appalshop) July 30, 2022
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