When an outbreak of deadly tornadoes tore through the small town of Mayfield, Kentucky, in December 2021, one family was slow to act, not because they didn’t know what to do. They didn’t know that they should do anything.

The family of Guatemalan immigrants only spoke Spanish, so they didn’t understand the tornado alert that appeared on their cell phones in English. “I was not looking at [an information source] that told me it was going to get ugly,” Rosa, identified only by her first name, told researchers for a study on how immigrant communities responded to the warnings. 

Another alert popped up in Spanish, and Rosa and her family rushed downstairs to shelter. Ten minutes later, a tornado destroyed the second floor where they’d been. 

For at least 30 years, the National Weather Service had been providing time- and labor-intensive manual translations into Spanish. Researchers have found that even delayed translations have contributed to missed evacuations, injuries, and preventable deaths. These kinds of tragedies prompted efforts to improve the speed and scope of translating weather alerts at local, state, and national levels.

Early into the Biden administration, the agency began a series of experimental pilot projects to improve language translations of extreme weather alerts across the country. The AI translating company Lilt was behind one of them. By the end of 2023, the agency had rolled out a product using Lilt’s artificial intelligence software to automate translations of weather forecasts and warnings in Spanish and Chinese.

“By providing weather forecasts and warnings in multiple languages, NWS will improve community and individual readiness and resilience as climate change drives more extreme weather events,” Ken Graham, director of NOAA’s National Weather Service, said in a press release announcing the 2023 launch. Since then, the service also added automatic translations into Vietnamese, French, and Samoan. The machine learning system could translate alerts in just two to three minutes — what might take a human translator an hour — said Joseph Trujillo Falcón, a researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign whose work supported the program. 

And now those alerts are gone. The National Weather Service has indefinitely suspended its automated language translations because its contract with Lilt has lapsed, according to an April 1 administrative message issued by the agency. The sudden change has left experts concerned for the nearly 71 million people in the U.S. who speak a language other than English at home. As climate change supercharges calamities like hurricanes, heat waves, and floods, the stakes have never been higher — or deadlier. 

“Because these translations are no longer available, communities who do not understand English are significantly less safe and less aware of the hazardous weather that might be happening in their area,” said a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration employee familiar with the translation project, whom Grist granted anonymity to protect them from retaliation. Hundreds of thousands of alerts were translated by the Lilt AI language model, the employee said.

An internal memo reviewed by Grist showed that the National Weather Service has stopped radio translations for offices in its southern region, where 77 million people live, and does not plan to revert to a previous method of translation — meaning that its broadcasts will no longer contain Spanish translations of forecasts and warnings. The move enraged some workers at local NWS offices, according to conversations relayed to the employee, as the decision not to restart radio translations was due to the workload burden as the service’s workforce faces cuts under the Trump administration.

No clear reason was given as to why the contract lapsed and the agency has discontinued its translations, the employee said. “Due to a contract lapse, NWS paused the automated language translation services for our products until further notice,” NOAA weather service spokesperson Michael Musher told Grist in a statement. Musher did not address whether the NWS plans to resume translations, nor did he address Grist’s additional requests for clarification. Lilt did not respond to a request for comment.

Fernando Rivera, a disaster sociologist at the University of Central Florida who has studied language-equity issues in emergency response, told Grist the move by the administration “is not surprising” as it’s in “the same trajectory in terms of [Trump] making English the official language.” Rivera also pointed to how, within hours of the president’s inauguration, the Trump administration shut down the Spanish-language version of the White House website. Trump’s mandate rescinded a decades-old order enacted by former President Bill Clinton that federal agencies and recipients of federal money must provide language aid to non-English speakers. 

“At the end of the day, there’s things that shouldn’t be politicized,” Rivera said.

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Of the millions of people living in the U.S. who don’t speak English at home, the vast majority speak Spanish, followed by Chinese, Tagalog, Vietnamese, and Arabic. Now that the contract with Lilt has lapsed, it’ll be difficult to fulfill the Federal Communications Commission’s pre-Trump ruling on January 8 that wireless providers support emergency alerts in the 13 most common languages spoken in the U.S., said Trujillo Falcón, the researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. 

The gap will have to be filled by doing translations by hand, or by using less accurate automated translations that can lead to confusion. Google Translate, for example, has been known to use “tornado clock” for “tornado watch” and grab the word for “hairbrush” for “brush fires” when translating English warnings to Spanish. Lilt, by contrast, trained its model specifically on weather-related terminologies to improve its accuracy.

While urban areas might have news outlets like Telemundo or Univision that could help reach Spanish-speaking audiences, rural areas don’t typically have these resources, Trujillo Falcón said: “That’s often where a lot of multilingual communities go to work in factories and on farms. They won’t have access to this life-saving information whatsoever. And so that’s what truly worries me.” 

It’s an issue even in states with a large population of Spanish speakers, like California. “It’s assumed that automatic translations of emergency information is commonplace and ubiquitous throughout California, but that’s not the case, particularly in our rural, agricultural areas where we have farmworkers and a large migrant population,” said Michael Méndez, a professor of environmental policy and planning at the University of California, Irvine. 

Méndez said that Spanish speakers have been targeted by misinformation during extreme weather. A study in November found that Latinos who use Spanish-language social media for news were more susceptible to false political narratives pertaining to natural disaster relief and other issues than those who use English-language media. The National Weather Service alerts were “an important tool for people to get the correct information, particularly now, from a trusted source that’s vetted,” Méndez said.

Amy Liebman, chief program officer at the nonprofit Migrant Clinicians Network, sees it only placing a “deeper burden” on local communities and states to fill in the gaps. In the days since the weather service contract news first broke, a smattering of local organizations across the country have already announced they will be doubling down on their work offering non-English emergency information. 

But local and state disaster systems also tend to be riddled with issues concerning language access services. A Natural Hazards Center report released last year found that in hurricane hotspots like Florida, state- and county-level emergency management resources for those with limited English proficiency are scarce and inconsistent. All told, the lack of national multilingual emergency weather alerts “will have pretty deep ripple effects,” said Liebman. “It’s a life or death impact.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Millions of Americans don’t speak English. Now they won’t be warned before weather disasters. on Apr 14, 2025.

Appalshop in Whitesburg, Kentucky has the largest collection of Appalachian media archives in the world, but roughly 70% of its 30,000-item collection was damaged in the historic regional flooding of 2022.

The nonprofit received two federal grants last year totaling nearly $1 million to fully restore and digitize much of the damaged archive.

Now that funding is at risk of being zeroed out.

The grants are administered by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), two federal agencies that have been gutted in recent weeks by the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency.

Last week, DOGE told the NEH all of its outstanding grants would be cancelled and 80% of its staff placed on administrative leave. In March, all of the IMLS staff was placed on administrative leave, a move that is expected to essentially cancel all its grants.

Both agencies are responsible for funding programs of museums and libraries across the country. Appalshop and the Kentucky Humanities Council are two of the major recipients of such funding in Kentucky, with officials from both saying the cuts represent an existential threat to the services they provide.

Chad Hunter, the founding archivist of Appalshop, said the nonprofit’s grants to restore photographic collections and a vast amount of film, video and audio collections damaged by the 2022 flooding are likely gone. Unlike the preservation of normal archives, he says flood damaged items degrade at a much faster rate, “so we have a smaller window of time to save these collections.”

“That is what is at risk here. We are going to lose what we believe to be the largest collection of Appalachian media in the world,” Hunter said. “We’re going to lose large portions of it without this funding.”

Bill Goodman, the executive director of the Kentucky Humanities Council, says they receive roughly $850,000 of NEH grants annually, which is nearly 70% of their total funding. In recent years, the council has distributed more than $1.3 million to libraries, museums and cultural centers for reading programs and exhibits, much of which is in rural areas.

“We’re fortunate that we have friends and supporters, and we have a little savings in the bank, and we’re going to continue to do the work that we’ve done for the last 53 years,” Goodman said. “But frankly, it’s going to be tough, and we’re going to do our best going forward.”

Goodman says the council is fortunate to have already spent its grant money for a Smithsonian Institute collaboration to have seven Native American history exhibits in rural parts of Kentucky this year, but other programs are at risk going forward. Noting the recent widespread flooding throughout Kentucky, he said the council was able to send NEH grants to flooded museums and cultural centers in the Appalachian region after the 2022 floods, but now “that money is gone.”

“We would be granting out that money today, if we had it, but last week, when the Department of Government Efficiency came in and slammed the door in our face and zeroed out our budget overnight, we can’t do some of those programs now,” Goodman said.

The race to save the Appalshop archive

Appalshop received an NEH grant last year of $225,581 to preserve three large collections of photographic prints damaged in the flooding, as well as a $750,000 Save America’s Treasures grant administered by the IMLS to salvage and preserve hundreds of hours of video and film from its damaged archives.

Hunter said the NEH grant has already been cancelled, though it fortunately has completed the preservation process for one of the three photo archives — 3,500 negatives of William R. “Pictureman” Mullins, a self-taught portraiture photographer, from the 1930s through 1950s. The remaining collections include photographs of the Brookside Coal strike in 1973, which was portrayed in the landmark documentary Harlan County USA.

Another of Appalshop’s NEH grants now cancelled is one for $150,000 to collect oral histories that document Black voices and experiences in Appalachia.

Hunter says Appalshop hasn’t yet received official confirmation that its $750,000 grant to preserve a large portion of its flooded film, video and audio archive is cancelled, but assumes it is a certainty, as the IMLS no longer has staff and other similar nonprofits were informed earlier this week that all of their grants were terminated.

He says the flood-damaged archives are currently in cold storage containers at locations in other states, “just waiting for the day that we can have further funding to try to salvage those, as well,” but notes that “there’s evidence that those are degrading, even at low temperatures and humidities.”

With federal funding now also frozen — and the clock ticking to preserve the material — Hunter said finding a new funding source quickly is “absolutely critical to the work we’re doing to save this vital collection.”

“We need to raise funding to preserve these collections that are for everybody,” Hunter said. “They’re for the public, they’re not for Appalshop. It’s a historic and cultural record of central Appalachia, so we need to save it.”

Higher ed grants and potential litigation

The University of Kentucky Research Foundation, University of Louisville and Western Kentucky University have also received hundreds of thousands of dollars in NEH grants in recent years, according to its records database. Most of these grants involve efforts to maintain and preserve historic archives.

A spokesperson for U of L did not immediately return a request for comment on how the NEH cuts would affect its grants. Spokespersons for UK and WKU said they have not been made aware of any pauses to NEH grants affiliated with the universities.

Goodman of the Kentucky Humanities Council says he expects a group of state attorneys general across the country to soon file litigation soon against the DOGE cuts to the NEH, similar to what has happened with other litigation challenging the Trump administration’s cuts to other federal programs and funding appropriated by Congress.

He added that he has also forwarded information about the NEH cuts and its effects on Kentucky to the office of Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat who has joined Democratic attorneys general from other states in previous lawsuits against the administration.

Spokespersons for Beshear did not immediately return a request for comment on the NEH and IMLS cuts and potential litigation.

State government and politics reporting is supported in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Correction: This story has been updated to reflect the size of the William R. “Pictureman” Mullins negatives collection.

Libby Lindsay spent 21 years working underground as a miner for Bethlehem Steel in West Virginia. She saw many safety improvements over the years, and always felt grateful that she could call the local Mine Safety and Health Administration office whenever she wondered whether a rule was being followed. She joined the safety committees launched by the local chapter of the United Mine Workers, which collaborated with the agency to watchdog coal companies. She understood the price that had been paid for the regulations it enforced. “Every law was written in blood,” she said. “It’s there because somebody was injured or killed.”

Still, she and others who work the nation’s mines worry President Trump is about to limit the agency’s local reach. As his administration targets federal buildings for closure and sale, 35 of its offices are on the list. Fifteen are in Appalachian coalfields, with seven in eastern Kentucky alone and the others concentrated in southern West Virginia and southeastern Pennsylvania. Of the remaining 20 offices, many are in the West, in remote corners of Wyoming, Nevada, and Colorado. Miners’ advocates worry these closures could reduce the capacity of an agency that’s vastly improved mining safety over the past 50 years or so and could play a vital role as the Trump administration promotes fossil fuels like coal, and as decarbonization efforts increase the need for lithium and other metals.

Since its inception in 1977, the agency has operated under the auspices of the Department of Labor to reduce the risks of what has always been one of the world’s most dangerous jobs. Before Congress created the agency, known as MSHA, hundreds of miners died each year, in explosions, tunnel collapses, and equipment malfunctions. (The number was far higher through the 1940s, often reaching into the thousands.) Last year, 31 people died in mining accidents, according to the agency’s data. Even after accounting for coal’s steady decline, that tally, while still tragic, reflects major strides in safety.

“Coal mining is a tough business. It’s a very competitive business. There’s always a temptation to compete on safety, to cut corners on safety, to make that your competitive advantage as a mine operator,” Christopher Mark, a government mine safety specialist who has spent decades making the job safer, told Grist. “And it’s our job to make sure that nobody can do that.”

Trump’s pick to lead MSHA, Wayne Palmer, who is awaiting confirmation, previously was vice president of the Essential Minerals Association, a trade association representing extraction companies. The Department of Labor declined to comment on the proposed lease terminations. A representative of the U.S. General Services Administration, which manages federal offices, told Grist that any locations being considered for closure have been made aware of that, and some lease terminations may be rescinded or not issued at all. 

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Many of the country’s remaining underground coal mines – the most dangerous kind – are located in Appalachia. MSHA has historically placed its field offices in mining communities. Although the number of coal mines has declined by more than half since 2008, tens of thousands of miners still work the coalfields. Many of them still venture underground.

The dwindling number of fatalities comes even as the MSHA has been plagued by continued staffing and funding shortfalls, with the federal Office of the Inspector General repeatedly admonishing the agency for falling below its own annual inspection targets. It also has recommended more frequent sampling to ensure mine operators protect workers from toxic coal and silica dust. After decades of work, federal regulators finally tightened silica exposure rules, but miners and their advocates worry too little staffing and too few inspections could hamper enforcement. 

“There are going to be fewer inspections, which means that operators that are not following the rules are going to get away with not following the rules for longer than they would have,” said Chelsea Barnes, the director of government affairs and strategy at environmental justice nonprofit Appalachian Voices. The organization has worked with union members and advocates for those with black lung disease to lobby for stricter silica dust exposure limits.

Last month, the United Mine Workers’ Association denounced the proposed office closures. As demand for coal continues to decline, it worries that companies could pinch pennies to maximize profits — or avoid bankruptcy. ​​”Companies are completely dependent upon the price of coal,” said Phil Smith, executive assistant to union president Cecil Roberts. ”[If] it’s bad enough, they think, ‘Well, we can cut a corner here. We can pick a penny there.’”

The Biden administration made an effort to staff the agency. In the waning days of Biden’s term, Chris Williamson, who led the agency at the time, told Grist he was “very proud of rebuilding our team” because “you can’t go out and enforce the silica standard or enforce other things if you don’t have the people in place to do it.” The union worries that the Trump administration, which has pursued sweeping layoffs throughout the government, will target MSHA, where many of the Biden hires remain probationary employees. Despite the previous administration’s attempts to bolster the agency, it still missed inspections due to understaffing.

Anyone who isn’t terminated will have to relocate to larger offices if Trump shutters local outposts, placing them further from the mines they keep tabs on. In addition to inspecting underground mines at least quarterly and surface mines biannually, inspectors make more frequent checks of operations where toxic gases are present. They also respond to complaints. Work now done by people in the offices throughout eastern Kentucky likely would be consolidated in Lexington, Kentucky, or Wise County, Virginia, which are 200 miles apart. 

Field offices have been consolidated before, and mining experts acknowledged there may be a time and a place for such things, but it’s highly unusual to close so many without due process. In early March, the House Committee on Education and Workforce submitted a letter to Vince Micone, the acting secretary of labor, requesting documents and information on the closures and expressing concern that as many as 90 mine inspection job offers may have been rescinded. Their letter specifically referred to the agency’s history of understaffing that led to catastrophes like the Upper Big Branch mine explosion that killed 29 people in 2010, the nation’s worst mining accident in four decades.

“One of the lessons of the Upper Big Branch Mine disaster, according to MSHA’s own internal investigation, is that staffing disruptions at the managerial level resulted in MSHA’s inspectors failing to adequately address smaller-scale methane explosions in the months leading up the massive explosion that killed 29 miners fifteen years ago this April,” read the letter, which was signed by Democratic representatives Bobby Scott of Virginia and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota.

The impact of potential cuts stretches far beyond coal, into the mines that will extract the lithium and other metals needed for clean energy and other industries. As of last year, the nation employed almost 256,000 metal and nonmetal miners who pull copper, zinc, and other things from the earth. “It’s an agency that matters, regardless of how we’re producing our energy,” said Chelsea Barnes of Appalachian Voices.

After spending so much time in the mines, Lindsay is concerned by the direction the Trump administration is heading, even as lawmakers in states like West Virginia and Kentucky have in recent years attempted to roll back regulations. “That’s going to be the future of MSHA,” she said. “They’re going to be in name only. Miners are going to die. And nobody but their families are going to care.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump administration moves to shutter mine safety offices in coal country on Mar 25, 2025.

Editor’s Note: This post is from our data newsletter, the Rural Index, headed by Sarah Melotte, the Daily Yonder’s data reporter. Subscribe to get a weekly map or graph straight to your inbox.

In a radical move to stave off perceived bureaucratic bloat, the Trump administration has laid off thousands of federal employees, including rural workers in public land agencies.

To pay for a proposed $4.5 trillion in tax cuts, the Trump administration has fired thousands of federal workers, including 1,300 workers at the CDC in Atlanta, more than 1,000 at the Department of Veteran Affairs, and 3,400 at the Forest Service.

GOP lawmakers are also eyeing cuts to social programs, like Medicaid, that help the poor and working class.

When you picture federal employees, you might imagine bureaucrats in suits and ties in pristine DC offices. But over a quarter million federal employees are stationed in rural counties across  the country in positions like park rangers, field biologists, or grazing managers, just to name a few of the possible jobs. 

President Trump’s firings will hurt many rural communities that rely on the federal government for a large share of their economic base.

The following map shows the percent of total wages in 2023 that came from federal employment. 

(The latest county-level data we have on industry wages and employment is from 2023. These figures don’t represent recent federal layoffs. Figures are in 2023 inflation-adjusted U.S. dollars.)

In the above map, I chose to represent the share of total wages rather than the share of total employment because federal jobs pay more, on average, than private sector jobs in rural counties. Wages might therefore be a better indicator of the federal government’s economic importance.

"These higher, more stable wages would result in more local spending, supporting local businesses and communities," said Megan Lawson, Ph.D., of Headwaters Economics in an email interview with the Daily Yonder.

In 2023, wages in rural private sector jobs were $50,600 per job, on average, compared to $79,300 per job in the federal government. 

Federal jobs only make up 1.6% of the total rural workforce, but in many rural communities, they are one of the largest employers.

"Especially in the West, where many federal layoffs are affecting public land agencies, these employees will not be able to manage our natural resources and serve the public,” Lawson said. “Our gateway communities whose economies depend on natural resources or recreation on federal land will feel the ripple effects when the resources and their visitors aren't being managed well. It's unclear how quickly these effects will be felt." 

Federal wages accounted for $21 billion in nonmetropolitan, or rural, counties in 2023.

In 2023,  federal jobs made up 20% of the total workforce in rural Garfield County, Washington, a community in southeastern Washington. Garfield County lies partially within the Umatilla National Forest, which spans 1.4 million acres in southern Washington and northern Oregon.

Employment in the federal government made up 29% of wages, meanwhile, representing a total of $11 million in 2023.

In Santa Cruz County, Arizona, 12% of the workforce was employed in the federal government in 2023, while 25% of all wages came from federal jobs, representing a total of $199 million in wages.

Santa Cruz is a rural county in southern Arizona that borders Mexico. The Coronado National Forest, a 1.7 million acre piece of federal land, lies almost entirely within the county. 

We don’t know whether all of the federal jobs in Santa Cruz and Garfield counties are in the National Forest Service, however. The data doesn’t tell us. Some of those federal positions could have been remote workers for other federal agencies.

The post Federal Layoffs Will Hurt Rural Counties appeared first on The Daily Yonder.

Washed out bridges, soggy sofas, and ruined ductwork: these are just a sampling of the kinds of damage that flood survivors need to thoroughly document to support a government application for financial aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Local county and city governments around the state are urging residents on social media to report any damages from extreme weather and flooding.

Whitney Bailey is the disaster response project director with AppalReD — a legal aid group in eastern Kentucky. She said survivors should take photos and, if possible, create an inventory of damaged items. For appliances and electronics, it may even be helpful to log models and serial numbers.

The documentation should extend to any infrastructure on private property too.

“Start taking pictures, if you haven’t yet, of any bridges, culverts, landslides, mudslides, anything around your home. Gravel roads also,” Bailey said. “You can start making repairs but, just make sure you take photos of everything so you have proof of the before and after. And absolutely hold on to every single receipt.”

In the meantime, Kentuckians will need to wait for FEMA to approve the state’s application for individual assistance programs to repair houses and items destroyed by flood waters. Governor Andy Beshear said it submitted the application on Tuesday for 10 eastern Kentucky counties to receive that aid.

If that aid is approved, it could green light immediate grants of more than $700 for survivors and nearly $44,000 for household repairs and replacement of damaged property. Households have 18 months to apply and appeal these financial awards, but can appeal as many times as needed.

Meanwhile, news outlets are reporting that many FEMA staff were fired the same weekend that disaster struck and more firings could come. President Donald Trump has posted on social media recently that FEMA should be “terminated” and offhandedly proposed the same while touring disaster-stricken areas. He has indicated he wants local governments and states to pay for more of the recovery costs.

Trump has approved an emergency declaration to assist Kentucky’s response, but that aid is limited to immediate emergency response and is capped at $5 million. It’s unclear how he might respond to Kentucky’s request for individual assistance programs, which have individual award limits, but typically have no overall limit to local governments.

President Donald Trump’s immigration plan aims to deport thousands of people that are living in the United States without proper documentation.

We wanted to get an idea of how Trump’s plan will impact Kentucky, a place that’s home to nearly 200,000 immigrants, according to the Migration Policy Institute, an independent, nonpartisan immigration policy think tank based in Washington, D.C.

So, we called more than 40 local law enforcement operations — the sheriff’s and police agencies that could be tapped to assist federal immigration agents. And we went inside the state’s only full-time immigration detention center — the Boone County jail, where federal agents can hold up to 175 people to await deportation.

KyCIR reporters Morgan Watkins and Jared Bennett discussed what they found with LPM’s Bill Burton. You can listen to the conversation by clicking the audio player above, or you can read more below.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Bill Burton: Jared, has the jail been holding more people since President Trump took office?

Jared Bennett: The Boone County jailer, Jason Maydak, told me he hasn’t seen any evidence of raids or increased enforcement here in Kentucky.

And actually he wasn’t really expecting any in this new Trump administration.

So far they have seen a slight bump, though. There were 131 people held for ICE there when I visited. That was January 28. And by February 3rd, that number rose to 175 people, which is the jail’s capacity for ICE detainees.

BB: How long are people held there?

JB: The jailer told me the average stay for ICE detainees at the Boone County jail was around 45 days, that’s a month and a half, but some people are there for much, much longer, and that’s one of the main issues with ICE holds right now.

People are held for ICE either waiting deportation or for their cases to move through immigration courts, and that can take a really long time. There was a backlog in immigration courts of 3.6 million cases at the end of the 2024 fiscal year.

A federal judge this past August found someone’s year-long stay at the Boone County jail without a bond hearing was unconstitutional. There’s no hard and fast rule about when detainment becomes problematic, but lawyers told me that courts start to get skeptical around six months.

And when I looked at the records I found 20 people had been at the Boone County jail for over six months, and three people for over a year.

BB: You got to tour the jail, what’s it like?

JB: For the most part, a jail is a jail. It’s a big facility, it’s clean, a lot of fluorescent lighting, and it was pretty quiet when I visited. It was below capacity. The jail performs pretty well on ICE inspections, they have a lot of different standards they have to meet to hold people for ICE. That inspection found only three deficiencies that the jailer told me were addressed right away.

But the ICE detainees themselves, they tell a different story. I wasn’t able to talk to any directly, but two filed a complaint with the U.S. Office of Civil Rights in 2021 and said the jail wasn’t taking COVID-19 seriously, didn’t provide translators or regular access to outdoors and recreation. One man from East Africa said he was called racial slurs at the jail.

The Office of Civil Rights investigated and in 2024 made 34 recommendations to address civil rights violations they found. We only have a summary of the findings, so we don’t know what all of the findings were, but we do know ICE only agreed with 18 of the recommendations.

BB: Morgan, Trump wants local police to help ICE enforce federal immigration laws. What do Kentucky officers say, though?

Morgan Watkins: I contacted over 40 police departments and sheriff’s offices and a majority of them got back to me. None of them reported having a formal agreement to partner with ICE, but none said they’d refuse to work with the agency, either.

Several officers said they’d have to consider their available resources – which are limited, especially for small police departments – if ICE asks them for help with an immigration operation.

BB: Do the law enforcement agencies have official policies on working with ICE?

MW: Most of the ones I talked to do not have a policy on ICE, specifically. Louisville Metro Police is an exception. LMPD has policies that limit how and when it can help ICE. A couple of Republican state lawmakers are proposing bills that could force Louisville to drop the restrictions, though.

Opioid abuse and rural homelessness create a spiral for some rural residents, a new study has found.

For the study, researchers with the Rural Opioid Initiative at Georgia State University interviewed more than 3,000 people in rural communities across 10 states who had used drugs. Of those, more than half (54%) said they had experienced homelessness in the last six months. 

April Ballard, assistant professor at the Georgia State University School of Public Health, said the research suggests that the number of rural homeless is significantly larger than federal data suggests.

“Houselessness is an issue in rural areas, but it’s not talked about,” Ballard said in an interview with the Daily Yonder. “That’s largely because it looks very different than in urban areas. It can look like couch surfing, or moving from place to place. It’s hard to count in the same way that we do in urban areas.”

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development requires a nationwide “Point in Time Count” of people experiencing homelessness on a single night in January. On that day, groups of volunteers spread out to count and talk to homeless people in a community. However, Ballard said, because of the nature of rural homelessness, getting an accurate count is difficult.

“In an urban area, there are groups of people that get together and they walk around the city and they talk to people (to get the homeless count),” she said. “That can be challenging, obviously, for urban areas that are really spread out or not walkable. But in rural areas, obviously, you’re not going to go climb mountains and go in the backwoods to count people. That’s just not feasible.”

Rural people without housing may live in different situations — with relatives, or in tents, or in cars, Ballard said — instead of living in shelters or on the street. That makes finding and identifying them difficult at best. And there is a greater prevalence of homelessness because of the nature of rural community economics, she said.

“In some rural areas there are fewer economic opportunities and more economic disparities,” she said. “There’s insufficient public housing infrastructure and a limited acknowledgement of rural houselessness, which means that less money and resources go toward it.”

In one case, the researchers counted up to five times as many people experiencing homelessness in Kentucky than the “point in time” counts had identified. In three counties, the research found, the “point in time” counts estimated there were no people who were homeless, while Ballard and her group found more than 100 people in those same counties who said they had used drugs and experienced homelessness in the previous  six months.

Mary Frances Kenion, vice president of training and technical assistance with the National Alliance to End Homelessness, agrees that homelessness in rural communities is undercounted.

“Every year, communities conduct an annual ‘point in time count, which is comparable to what we see in the Census —where folks go out knocking door to door to count people,” she said in an interview with the Daily Yonder. “But how do you count people that don’t have a door to answer?”

Rural homelessness, she said, stems not only from lower economic opportunities and a lack of affordable housing, but a lack of support services as well.

“We see a lack of service providers that are really responsible for a whole range of services to the community,” she said. “We do not seem to see the same concentration of service providers that you would see in, say, metropolitan Atlanta or Washington, D.C., or New York City.”

Ballard said her team’s research also indicated that there is a link between opioid use and rural homelessness, each one feeding off of the other.

“Obviously, it’s very clear that the opioid epidemic, as well as other sorts of drugs, has just been wreaking havoc on rural America for a while now. And I would say that houselessness has been an issue in rural areas, but it’s not talked about,” she said. “These two things, I think have been happening in parallel, and as the opioid epidemic has dramatically increased, it [has led] to that kind of cycle.”

The social losses that accompany opioid use disorder, Ballard said — such as unemployment, financial ruin, and the loss of family and social networks — can lead to housing instability and homelessness. In turn, the harsh living conditions presented by homelessness can perpetuate drug use as a coping mechanism. Together the two can create a self-reinforcing cycle that contributes to poorer health and shorter lifespans.

Homelessness can also inhibit treatment and medical care, Ballard said. People  without stable housing were 1.3 times more likely to report being hospitalized for serious bacterial infection and 1.5 times more likely to overdose, the study found. Ballard said the lack of access to clean water contributed to a higher infection rate, while the prevalence of homeless people to use drugs alone increased the risk of accidental overdoses.

Although the two often overlap, Kenion cautioned against equating homelessness with drug addiction.

“I would be really careful about drawing parallels to the narrative that sometimes takes over that the majority of people experiencing homelessness are addicted to opioids or other substances, because that’s not supported by the data,” she said.

Rather, many homeless people across the country have experienced financial hardships — even one unexpected expense —that spiraled out of control and forced them from their homes, she said.

“Not a lot of people realize how folks are just often one crisis away from experiencing housing instability and homelessness, but that is felt more acutely in rural communities,” she said. “If you look at the overall snapshot, rural homelessness has actually increased by 17% between the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic and 2023. And 42% of people experiencing homelessness in rural areas are in unsheltered situations, with women and families with children being far more likely to be unsheltered outdoors.”

Both Ballard and Kenion agree that accurately counting the homeless in rural communities in necessary in order to ensure they have the services they need to get back on their feet.

Additionally, Ballard said, having an accurate count can help ensure the rural homeless who have drug abuse issues can get the help that they need.

“I feel like without that awareness, we are not allocating resources to this,” Ballard said. “From a policy standpoint, it’s incredibly important for us to be capturing accurate information and accurate estimates, so that we’re actually dedicating the right amount of resources to communities. If we are trying to stop deaths related to drug use as well as other epidemics related to HIV and hepatitis C, and we’re not considering housing status, efforts to mitigate that are not going to be as effective or as efficient.”

The post Study: Rural Homelessness Is Underestimated and Exacerbated by Opioid Epidemic appeared first on The Daily Yonder.

Editor’s Note: This post is from our data newsletter, the Rural Index, headed by Sarah Melotte, the Daily Yonder’s data reporter. Subscribe to get a weekly map or graph straight to your inbox.

People flee at the onset of a natural disaster. We know this. For those willing and able to leave, there’s the usual scramble. Where are my children’s baby pictures, my social security card? What do I do about my grandmother’s china?

But what happens in the weeks, months, and years following a disaster, when the ash settles and our attention shifts to the next  crisis?

In 2017, the Umpqua North Complex fires burned 43,158 acres in Douglas County, Oregon, a rural community in the southwest part of the state. Some people did leave. From 2020 to 2023, 1,100 people moved out of the county. But during the same period, 4,200 people moved into Douglas County, for a net gain of 5,400. . 

Net migration (the difference between the number of people who move to a county minus the people who leave) resulted in a gain of 20,000 residents in rural Oregon counties during the same time period. 

But this phenomenon isn’t particular to Oregon, or even the Pacific Northwest. Across the nation, people are moving to rural counties with a high risk of wildfires, according to data from Wildfire Risk to Communities, a joint project by Headwaters Economics and the Fire Modeling Institute of the Rocky Mountain Research Station of the Forest Service. 

Rural counties with high wildfire risk gained 2.5% of their total 2020 population in net migration between 2020 and 2023, representing a gain of 540,000 residents. Rural counties without high wildfire risk only gained about 1% of their total 2020 population in net migration, meanwhile. 

Nearly two-thirds of high risk rural counties experienced a net positive migration between 2020 and 2023 compared to only 60% of rural counties at-large.

Metropolitan areas with high risk of wildfires only gained about half a percentage point of their total 2020 population in net migration, representing an additional 1 million residents. 

The Wildfire Risk to Communities categorizes counties as high risk of wildfire if they score above the 84th percentile on their dataset’s wildfire risk index. To put it simply, counties are at high risk of wildfires if 84% of all other counties score lower than them on the index.

Nearly half (48%) of the growth in rural counties at high risk of wildfire happened in the Southeast among rural counties like coastal Georgetown, South Carolina, a popular vacation spot. 

These Southeastern counties are not places we usually picture when we think of wildfires, but fire has been a central part of the Southeastern coastal ecosystem for millions of years. Wildfires are particularly important for southern trees like the longleaf pine, which needs fire to germinate its seeds.

But Southeastern counties in general don’t rank as high on the wildfire risk index compared to rural counties in Western states. The average rural county in the South scores in the 60th percentile on the wildfire risk index, but the Coastal West, a region that includes the states of California, Oregon, and Washington, scored, on average, in the 77th percentile. 

When you signed up for “Rural Index,” I promised you one map every two weeks, but I’ve included a second one in this issue. My treat. Don’t get used to it. 

Rural counties that scored higher than the 90th percentile in the wildfire risk index had a net increase of 82,700 people between 2020 and 2023. 

In the Northwest states of Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana, rural counties that scored over the 90th percentile had a net migration that equaled 10% of their 2020 population, representing a net gain of about 24,000 newcomers.

The wildfire risk dataset shows a mild relationship between how a county scores on the wildfire risk index and the county’s net migration. The higher the wildfire risk index, or percentile, the greater the net migration. 

But wildfire risk only explains a small portion of the increase in net migration in recent years. Many of rural America’s riskiest counties are in picturesque regions, like the counties surrounding Zion National Park in Utah. My previous reporting for the Daily Yonder explored how areas with outdoor amenities gained population faster than other rural areas. 

I suppose now is a good time to remind you that correlation does not equal causation. Wildfires are not causing people to move to risky areas, in other words. That would be absurd. But wildfires seem to be a risk many folks don’t mind taking if it means they get to live near some of America’s most breathtaking views.

The post Rural Wildfire Risk Doesn’t Stop New Residents appeared first on The Daily Yonder.

In September, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) unveiled its Rural Public Health Strategic Plan, which outlines the priorities, objectives and outcomes the agency hopes to see over the next five years as it collaborates with other federal agencies and various stakeholders on how to improve the health of rural residents.

The plan was developed with the help of more than 50 experts within the CDC who reviewed more than 200 rural initiatives, programs and efforts to identify opportunities. Then the agency enlisted the feedback from more than 230 federal and external partners through listening sessions, lunch meetings and town hall events, Dr. Diane Hall, the director of the CDC’s Office of Rural Health (ORH), said in an interview with the Daily Yonder.

The strategic plan is a guide for ORH and the CDC at large, as it moves forward with programs and research into rural health needs. Developed with stakeholders such as the National Rural Health Association (NRHA) and state offices of rural health, the plan seeks to combat issues that are seen at higher levels in rural communities, like obesity, chronic illnesses and substance abuse.

Opened last year, the ORH came as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. Disparities between urban and rural access to care shined a spotlight on the need for more attention on rural public health, she said. The strategic plan is the office’s first major publication.

“We really wanted the strategic plan to actually be strategic, but also be actionable,” Dr. Diane Hall, the director of the CDC’s Office of Rural Health, said in an interview with the Daily Yonder. “But more than that, we wanted it to be relevant to the lives of people that live in rural communities.”

Stakeholders, like Alan Morgan, CEO of the NHRA, said the plan is an indication of what is coming in rural health. 

“Realistically, this is a blueprint for the future,” Morgan said in an interview with the Daily Yonder. “They have highlighted long-standing issues and now they have a direction and a plan to get to where they need to be.”

The plan focuses on four main priorities – engaging with community health partners, strengthening rural public health infrastructure, advancing rural public health science and improving rural public health preparedness and response.

“CDC is committed to advancing rural public health across America by identifying and addressing gaps in the evidence base, data analytic capabilities, and the workforce in rural communities,” the plan said.

Hall said her office will work alongside stakeholders and other subject matter experts to develop a more specific action plan and to determine how best to serve rural areas.

“A lot of times, rural communities haven’t really been served well by government policies or decisions,” she said. “All of that needs to be addressed when we’re talking about health decisions.”

The plan isn’t regionally or state-specific, but it is a step toward an action plan, Hall said.

“Rural health is an issue that garners bipartisan support in Congress,” Hall said. “And Congress has been very clear that they wanted the CDC to create this office. These are the first steps in a very long process to address the rural urban disparities in healthcare.”

Hall said that before the end of the year, the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), part of the CDC, will release an updated method for urban-rural classification.

That will make researching rural health issues easier, Katy Backes Kozhimannil, the co-director of the University of Minnesota Rural Health Research Center, said in an interview with the Daily Yonder. One of the issues facing researchers is determining the rurality of subjects.

Although the strategic plan doesn’t provide direct actionable items, it is a step in the right direction, Kozhimannil said.

“This is a long process,” she said. “Working with local hospitals and rural public health agencies, as well as research centers like ours, is the beginning of the process. I think we’re all looking forward to the next steps and seeing what action items come out of this strategic plan.”

The post CDC Presents a Five-Year Plan for Rural Healthcare appeared first on The Daily Yonder.

Gov. Andy Beshear announced what he said is the third largest job announcement in Kentucky during his governorship Friday — a $712 million battery manufacturing plant in Shelbyville.

Officials said the plant would eventually become the largest employer in the city; the company is expected to hire 1,572 employees in its first three years.

“We’d already become the [electric vehicle] battery production capital of the United States, but with this investment, we’re putting our stamp on working to become just the battery capital of the United States of America,” Beshear said. “Now with Shelbyville Battery Manufacturing, we’re going to lead in the industrial electrification space.”

The two other major projects of Beshear’s administration — BlueOval SK Battery Park in Hardin County and the AESC battery manufacturing plant in Bowling Green — both produce electric vehicle batteries.

The new plant will create industrial battery cells and modules used in projects like solar and hydroelectric power generation. Shelbyville Battery Manufacturing is owned by e-STORAGE, a subsidiary of Canadian Solar Inc. which is a global renewable energy company based in Ontario.

The facility appears to be on the same site as a previously announced plant. Energy storage firm EnerVenue finished construction of the plant last year, but never began operations.

Because the one-million-square-foot factory is already largely constructed, Colin Parkin, president of e-STORAGE, said they hope to have the plant up and running by the end of next year.

“The products we will build in the Shelbyville factory will be ready, will be installed into energy storage projects nationwide by early 2026,” Parkin said. “That is, of course, a very aggressive timeline.”

The Kentucky Economic Development Finance Authority approved a 15-year incentive agreement with Shelbyville Battery Manufacturing, with up to $35 million in tax incentives — and another $5 million besides through the Kentucky Enterprise Initiative Act. The governor’s office said those incentives are based on the company’s investment and an average hourly wage of $25.34 with benefits for 15 years across the nearly 1,600 new jobs.

GOP Senate President Robert Stivers of Manchester said in a statement he celebrated the new investment.

“The General Assembly has worked to foster a pro-business environment in Kentucky, making us an attractive destination for global companies,” Stivers said. “We’ll continue this work, alongside Gov. Beshear, to keep bringing opportunity to our citizens.”

Shelby County Judge/Executive Dan Ison said he wants to increase industry in Shelby County by welcoming “quality business.”

“We don’t just open the door and say, ‘Come in, pollute our community.’ No, we get clean business. We get good business. We get good jobs,” Eisen said.

State government and politics reporting is supported in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.