“The basic idea is to go to a few specific communities, and through community engagement, figure out what are the challenges that they are facing with regard to the impact of extreme weather on the power grid, and then solve some of those issues in terms of community outreach and engagement, designing new methods to make the grid more resilient,” said Tim Hansen, associate professor in SDSU’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and co-principal investigator on the project.
Hansen said the research project is based in strategic locations in which different weather events occur. Alaska, for example, deals with extreme cold, while Puerto Rico deals with storms and flooding.
The common issue is that all the events impact the power grid, he said. “Our focus is on power grid resiliency from different perspectives.”
As part of the project, the researchers will work with community members on engagement. Hansen told the Daily Yonder it will be a ground-up approach so see what the community is willing to adopt.
Daisy Huang is an associate professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and mechanical engineer. She also conducts research at the Alaska Center for Energy and Power, which looks at optimizing power, mostly in rural communities around Alaska. She said the rural communities are mostly not connected to the state grid.
“So they’re all on their own diesel fired power plants. And so we look at ways to integrate renewables [and] optimize their diesel for maximum efficiency,” she told the Daily Yonder.
Huang said she is also interested in creating educational programs around STEM.
“The idea is looking from a community perspective – what their energy needs are, and how we can translate that – in parallel – developing educational programs around kids learning about energy systems, [like] engineering or STEM in general, math, physics.”
There will also be a virtual reality lab for remote power and energy research studies between all the participating institutions, Hansen told the Yonder.
He said that many of the researchers on the project are young investigators. “It’s a very good opportunity for the [National Science Foundation] to really build up the mentorship, and really build a lot of people’s long-term careers off of the back of this,” he added.
Election Deniers Focus Recruitment in ‘Out of the Way Places’
When people ask how Cathy Darling Allen is doing, she no longer responds with the socially-appropriate “fine” people expect to hear, because she’s not fine.
For more than two years, Allen, who runs the elections office in northern California’s Shasta County, has spent much of her time fending off accusations that her office falsifies election results.
“I’ve actually heard people say, ‘Well, you’re cheating to get where you want so that your people will win,’” Allen said in a Daily Yonder interview. “Oh, Lord, if I only had the time for that.”
Shasta County Clerk Cathy Darling Allen at her desk in the elections office on August 16, 2023. (Photo by Emma Williams)
In January 2023, the Shasta County board of supervisors decided in a 3-2 vote to cancel their electronic voting system contract after mounting pressure from election deniers. The county is the center of a small metropolitan area and has a mix of rural and urban communities. It comes in at more than 112,000 registered voters and now plans to use a hand-count system.
The decision adds to the growing number of counties – rural, suburban, and urban – where election deniers have successfully urged local governments to recount election results or throw out electronic voting machines altogether.
While the movement has targeted communities of every size, civics experts say rural communities have the most to lose from the pressures of the election denial movement.
“We’re at this period that I think should be being celebrated as a sort of high point of participation in American democracy,” said Justin Grimmer, a political science professor at Stanford University who studies election denialism, in a Daily Yonder interview. But the election denial movement threatens this progress, he said.
Voter turnout in the last three federal elections broke records. The 2020 presidential election saw the highest turnout in the 21st century with 66.8% of citizens age 18 or older casting a vote, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. A series of reforms have also been passed to make election infrastructure – how votes are cast, counted, and reported – safer and more efficient.
Former President Donald Trump’s unfounded attacks on the U.S. election system and the resulting election-denial movement put these gains in jeopardy. Rural areas could be among the first to suffer from the attacks.
Rural America already has lower voter turnout rates, which some researchers argue is due to inadequate election infrastructure. One 2022 study found that voting-by-mail restrictions hurt rural voters the most because there are fewer rural polling locations than urban ones, increasing the distance a person must travel to cast a vote. Along with skepticism about electronic voting machines, election deniers have also questioned the use of mail-in ballots, even though voting by mail has been used in some form in the United States since the 1860s.
Reversing the progress that has been made to improve election infrastructure – the use of equipment that more accurately counts votes and ensuring better access to voting through absentee and mail-in ballots, for example – could set back civic participation, Grimmer said.
“If localities start acting in a reactionary way because of these election integrity groups and they decide that they’re gonna peel back some of these reforms…you could actually end up eliminating some of the transparency that has been implemented,” Grimmer said. “It may be harder to track your ballot, which could ironically make people more skeptical about the election than they were before.”
The current election denial movement began in the months leading up to the 2020 presidential election. Trump said in a speech to supporters in August of that year that “the only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged.” He voiced similar comments on Twitter.
In the weeks following the election, organized efforts began in several states to overturn the election results, claiming the elections were stolen. (In mid-August 2023, Trump was indicted in Georgia on charges that he and others illegally tried to overturn the election in the state.)
Then came January 6, 2021, when more than 2,000 people broke into the Capitol in an effort to block certification of the Electoral College results. (In early August 2023, Trump was indicted on federal charges related to those events.)
Related Story: A Daily Yonder analysis of arrests in the year following the January 6 insurrection shows that arrestees are no more likely to be rural than the population at large.
After Trump left office, the election denial movement shifted to a core group of “influencers,” including MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, former business-law professor David Clements, former math and science teacher Douglas Frank, and former U.S. Army Captain Seth Keshel. Over the past two-and-a-half years, these influencers have made it a full-time job traveling the country to spread the election denial movement’s primary message: elections are being stolen, and it’s the government’s fault.
In some places, this messaging has worked. According to data compiled by the Daily Yonder as of August 24, 2023, seven U.S. counties have successfully held a hand-count or plan to in future elections.
Along with Shasta County, California; Spalding County, Georgia, and Cleburne County, Arkansas, recently approved hand-counts for future elections. Nye and Esmeralda counties, Nevada, both held hand-counts for their 2022 elections, as did Tripp County, South Dakota. Lycoming County, Pennsylvania, recounted by hand the results of the 2020 presidential election in January of 2023.
Four out of the seven counties that held a hand-count or completely eliminated their electronic voting systems are nonmetropolitan, or rural.
Some voting districts within counties in Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Wisconsin plan to hand-count ballots in 2024, according to the nonpartisan organization Verified Voting.
But many pushes to pass hand-count policies have failed. In June of 2023, Governor Katie Hobbs of Arizona – the only state to try mandating hand-counts statewide – vetoed a bill that would have allowed any county in the state to hand-count ballots. Similar efforts at county and municipal levels have also failed.
Although the movement’s success may be waning at the moment, some civics experts warn that election denial “is down…not out.”
Election deniers are now putting energy into grassroots organizing, a quieter version of the loud-and-proud campaigning led by Trump that occurred in the movement’s nascent days.
“They’re kind of spreading the [erroneous] word about how voting machines particularly are stealing elections, and they’re encouraging people to put in Freedom of Information Act-types of requests and at the extreme, encouraging let’s just say impolite behavior toward election officials,” said Charles H. Stewart, a professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in a Daily Yonder interview. Stewart published research in early 2023 exploring the characteristics that lead people to the election denial movement.
“The thing that we’re seeing in 2020 that we didn’t see in 2016, or in 2012 or other times when these sorts of [election integrity] questions arose, is that we now have about a half-dozen of these traveling road shows,” Stewart said. Few of these “road shows” are held in major cities, according to Stewart.
An NPR analysis of grassroots election denial events between January 6, 2021, and June 30, 2022, showed that the gatherings occurred in nearly every state. The events hit major cities like Minneapolis, St. Louis, and Washington, D.C. But they tended to steer toward the suburbs, smaller metropolitan areas, and in some cases, rural counties.
In Pennsylvania, for example, the NPR database shows there were no events in the city of Pittsburgh, but four counties within the Pittsburgh metropolitan area did have events. Philadelphia had one event, and there were two in the city’s surrounding counties. Only one Pennsylvania event on the NPR list was in a nonmetropolitan, or rural, county.
These in-person events distinguish the election denial movement from other far-right conspiracies that have existed primarily online.
“The election integrity movement is distinct from something like QAnon, which was by and large an online phenomenon,” said Stanford University’s Grimmer. “Here, I think it’s reversed.”
While people are getting some of their information about election denialism online, Grimmer said, the real force of the movement comes from the in-person meetings. “Individuals are coming together, discussing the things that they think are surprising or suspicious in their local elections and then actually going out in their community and doing something,” Grimmer said.
The exterior of the Lycoming County elections office in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Claire Carlson)
This played out in Lycoming County, Pennsylvania, a small metropolitan area with about 114,000 residents. In January 2023 a local election denial group successfully petitioned for a recount of the 2020 presidential election. Most of the group’s organizing has been conducted in-person at various community centers around Williamsport, Pennsylvania (population 28,000), the Lycoming County seat.
Poll workers recounted nearly 60,000 ballots by hand; the difference between the electronic and manually-counted ballots came in at just a handful of votes. Election officials attributed the difference to poorly-circled ovals on the ballot that the machine could not detect.
Lycoming County’s elections director says the election denial group represents a loud minority in the community. “I think it’s easy to walk up to somebody and get them to sign almost anything,” said elections director Forrest Lehman. “In doing this hand-count, probably 4,900 out of those 5,000 people [who signed the petition] are gonna say, OK, well fine. I guess the results were correct.”
Lycoming County elections director Forrest Lehman sits in his office on April 6, 2023. (Photo by Claire Carlson)
But it’s the other 100 people who are driving the movement in rural areas like Lycoming County, Lehman told the Daily Yonder.
Even after the hand-count results showed no proof of fraud in the electronically-counted ballots, the local election denial group has doubled down on their accusations, inviting election denier Sam Faddis, a retired CIA officer, to speak at their meetings. Like the election deniers touring nationally (such as Mike Lindell and Seth Keshel), Faddis has toured Pennsylvania to speak with other election denial groups.
“They allege that our vote totals were off by thousands based on these questionable statistical analyses that are being peddled not only in this state, but in a lot of places by a couple big names that keep coming up,” Lehman said.
Nearly 2,000 miles to the west of Lycoming County, a county clerk is experiencing similar accusations fueled by the election denial movement’s main talking points.
In La Plata County, Colorado, an influx of open records requests have poured in since 2020 challenging the election tools the county uses, which include Dominion Voting Systems – an electronic voting hardware and software company – and mail-in ballots. The county has relied on mail-in ballots since 1992.
“What’s happened to us is people from the outside and different organizations that don’t have anything to do with our local communities are attacking us because ‘Oh my gosh, you have Dominion or you use mail ballots and we don’t trust you,’ ” said La Plata County Clerk Tiffany Lee in a Daily Yonder interview. “That’s been really hard on us.”
Most of the open records requests use the same language provided by state and national election denial groups, Lee said.
La Plata County Clerk Tiffany Lee in the county elections office on July 31, 2023. (Photo by Ilana Newman)
Lee has not experienced the violent threats other election officials have received (a Maricopa County, Arizona election official received death threats through voicemail in 2021, for example), but her office is on high alert, especially as they move into the 2024 presidential election year.
And they have good reason to be.
In 2021, the U.S. Department of Justice established the Election Threats Task Force to investigate threats to election workers, which they identified as on the rise post-2020.
In the task force’s first year, more than 1,000 threats were reported, and approximately 11% of them met the requirements for federal criminal investigation, according to a press release. Of the potentially criminal threats, 58% of them were in states with post-election lawsuits, audits, and recounts.
In May 2023, the Department of Homeland Security released a national terrorism advisory bulletin that warns of a heightened domestic violence threat moving into the 2024 election year. The causes for this violence include individuals’ “perceptions of the 2024 general election cycle and legislative or judicial decisions pertaining to sociopolitical issues.” The advisory expires November 23, 2023.
The psychological toll these threats take on election workers is severe: In Colorado, 23 of the state’s 64 county clerks were new to the office last year, according to Lee. This high turnover poses another risk to the elections process.
“If we chase off election workers with this insanity, we’re going to make elections run more poorly,” said Grimmer from Stanford University. “We’ll be hemorrhaging so much experience and expertise for no reason other than the sort of falsehoods that are in people’s brains.”
As election officials gear up for local and state elections this November and a presidential election next year, county clerks are preparing to head off even more fraud accusations.
Rural county clerks hope their communities will trust them through the process.
“We’re just here to do our jobs,” Lee said. “Just like your county treasurer, your county assessor, your coroner, your surveyor; your county clerks are the same. We’re just administrators of the law.
“And I hope that rural communities across the United States understand that, that we’re just human beings doing good work for the people’s voices to be heard.”
‘Oppenheimer’ Discourse Leaves Out Downwind Communities
Editor’s Note: This article first appeared in Keep It Rural, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Like what you see here? Join the mailing list and receive more like this in your inbox each week.
Christopher Nolan’s biopic of Robert Oppenheimer, “father of the atomic bomb,” opened recently and the internet exploded with praise and #Barbenheimer jokes (the Barbie movie premiered on the same day and the contrast between the two made for some excellent memes).
While I’ve certainly spent my fair share of time indulging in these memes, one aspect of “Oppenheimer” that’s been largely overlooked are the real-life impacts of the Manhattan Project, the lab Oppenheimer led that developed the atomic bomb.
Oppenheimer’s work took him to Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the world’s first nuclear weapon was developed and eventually tested in the Alamogordo Bombing Range, also known as the Jornada del Muerto desert, 210 miles south of Los Alamos. One hundred more tests were conducted between 1945 and 1962 in New Mexico and Nevada, according to Princeton University research.
The fallout of these tests in rural communities near and far has been felt ever since.
The bomb was developed by the United States, with support from Canada and the United Kingdom, during World War II in response to threats that Germany was developing their own nuclear weapons. Atomic bombs were dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in August of 1945, killing an estimated 110,000 to 210,000 people, most of them civilians.
As the United States developed its nuclear weapons technology, scientists chose remote areas in Nevada and New Mexico to drop test bombs under the assumption that nothing was out there. Of course, this wasn’t true: the desert is home to thousands of plant and animal species that have built remarkable adaptations to the extreme temperatures — high and low — this biome is known to bring. But not everyone recognizes the value of the desert, which is why it’s been the site of not just nuclear bomb testing but radioactive waste storage proposals and aircraft boneyards.
The desert is home to people, too. “Downwinders” is the term used to describe people exposed to radioactive contamination from nuclear fallout. The health effects are deadly: 19 types of cancer are listed as compensable under the Radioactive Exposure Compensation Act that provides financial support to people who were exposed to nuclear fallout. The law has awarded more than $2.5 billion to nuclear workers and downwinders near the Nevada test site in the south of the state (crowds used to flock to the Las Vegas strip to view the mushroom clouds that formed from the dropped bombs).
But New Mexicans were left out of much of this funding, even though Los Alamos was where the first atomic test bomb — called the Trinity Test — was dropped. This test is the main plot of the new Oppenheimer movie.
According to reporting from Source New Mexico, “despite the government’s continued description of the Jornada del Muerto test site as ‘isolated,’ and ‘remote’ in archives, tens of thousands of people lived within 50 miles of the first nuclear blast. These people, and their descendants were marked by diseases without family histories [that might predispose them] – including leukemia and other cancers.”
The Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium is a group of New Mexicans who claim they were exposed to nuclear fallout from the Trinity Test and suffered from illness and death afterward. Some downwinders were as close as 12 miles to the drop, according to the group.
The Radioactive Exposure Compensation Act has never provided this group compensation. And new research shows the Trinity Test’s nuclear fallout may have reached even farther than New Mexico, to 46 states and Mexico and Canada.
These are the details “Oppenheimer” leaves out, making it a painful watch for people still suffering from the Trinity Test aftermath.
Old nightmares and new dreams mark the year since Kentucky’s devastating flood
The dream that haunts Christine White is always the same, and though it comes less frequently, it isn’t any less terrifying.
The black water comes rushing at the witching hour, barrelling toward her front door in Lost Creek, Kentucky. She’s outside, getting her grandson’s toys out of the yard. It hits her in the neck and knocks her off her feet before racing down a street that has become a vengeful river. She and her husband run to a hillside and scramble upward, grabbing hold of tree roots and branches. She finds her neighbors huddled at the top of the hill. As dawn comes, everything is unrecognizable, the land shifted, houses torn from foundations. They begin to walk through the trees, over the strip mine, out of the forest, in their pajamas and underwear with whatever they were able to carry when they fled.
Then she wakes up.
That night used to replay every time White went to sleep. She started taking antidepressants six months ago, something she felt ashamed of at first but doesn’t anymore. They’ve helped a little, but the dream still haunts her, lightning-seared and vivid.
It’s been one year since catastrophic floods devastated eastern Kentucky, taking White’s home and 9,000 or so others with it. Her current abode — a camper on a cousin’s land — has become, if not home, no longer strange. But it’s the closest thing to home she’ll get till her new house, in another county, is finished. Lost Creek, though, is all but gone forever. What houses remain are empty husks. Some are nothing more than foundations overgrown with grass.
White is never going back. “All the land is gone,” she said.
Christine White poses for a photo in Eastern Kentucky, one year after floods destroyed her home. Grist / Katie Myers
In the early hours of July 28, 2022, creeks and rivers across 13 counties in eastern Kentucky overran their banks, filled by a month’s worth of rain that fell in a matter of days The water crested 14 feet above flood stage in some places, shattering records. All told, 44 people died and some 22,000 people saw their homes damaged —staggering figures in a region where some counties have fewer than 20,000 residents. Officially, the inundation destroyed nearly 600 homes and severely damaged 6,000 more. A lot of folks say that tally is low, based on the number of residents who sought help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. As of March about 8,000 applications for housing assistance had been approved. That’s half the number the agency received.
The need for help, specifically housing assistance, was, and remains, acute. Most people here live on less than $30,000 a year, and at the time of the disaster, no more than 5 percent had flood insurance. Multitudes of nonprofits, church and community organizations, businesses, and government agencies have spent months pitching in as best they can. Yet there is a feeling among the survivors that no one’s at the rudder, and it’s everyone for themselves.
President Biden issued a federal disaster declaration the day after the flood, and his administration has disbursed nearly $300 million in aid so far. The state pitched in, too, housing 360 families in trailers parked alongside those from FEMA. Many of those have moved on to more permanent housing, but up to 1,800 are still awaiting a solution.
Some in the floodplains are taking buyouts — selling their homes to the federal government, which will essentially make the land a permanent greenspace. It’s a form of managed retreat, a ceding of the terrain to a changing climate. Some local officials openly worry that the approach doesn’t solve the biggest problem everyone faces: figuring out where on Earth people are going to live now. Eastern Kentucky was grappling with a critical shortage of housing even before the flood, and much of the land available for construction lies in flood-prone river bottoms. That has people looking toward the mountaintops leveled by strip mining.
A vacant building in Whitesbury, Kentucky, one year after floods devastated the Eastern part of the state.
Grist / Katie Myers
Kate Clemons, who runs a nonprofit meal service called Roscoe’s Daughter, sees this crisis every day. As the water receded, she started serving hot meals in the town of Hindman a few nights each week, on her own dime. She figured it would be a months’ work. She’s still feeding as many as 700 hungry people every week. Recently, an apartment building in Hazard burned down, displacing nearly 40 people. Some of them were flood survivors. They’ve joined the others she’s taken to helping find homes.
“There’s no housing available for them,” she said.
Clemons often brings food to Sasha Gibson, who after the flood moved with her boyfriend and nine children into two campers at Mine Made Adventure Park in Knott County. At first, she felt optimistic. “I was hoping that this would open up a new door to something better,” she said, after asking her children to go to the other trailer so she could sit for the interview in her cramped quarters. “Like this is supposed to be a new chapter in our lives.”
But the park, built on what was once a strip mine, became purgatory instead.
Sasha Gibson, left, moved with her boyfriend and nine children into two campers at Mine Made Adventure Park in Knott County. Parker Hobson
Gibson, who lived on family land before the rains came, wants to leave. It’s just that the way out isn’t apparent yet. Many rentals won’t take so big a family. It doesn’t help that many of their identity documents were lost to the flood, making the search that much harder. She got some help from FEMA, but said the money went too quickly.
A caseworker helps navigate a labyrinth of agencies designed to help Kentucky flood victims, and they’ve put in applications at a grab bag of charities building housing. One has told Gibson her case looks promising, but she’s still waiting to hear a final word. Other applications are so long and such a crapshoot — one ran 40 pages, for a loan she’d struggle to pay back — that she’s too tired to put them together.
“It’s a big what-if game,” she said. “They’re not reaching out to you. You’re expected to call them.”
Meanwhile, ATV riders sometimes ride through to the park, kicking up dust and leaving a mess in the restrooms. Gibson tries not to resent them. It’s not their fault she’s stuck.
“While it’s great and, like, they’re having a good time, it’s not a great time for us because we feel like we’re stuck here and we’re, like, an inconvenience and we’re in the way,” she said. “We don’t want to bother anybody.”
As extreme weather intensifies due to climate change, stories like Gibson’s will play out in more and more communities. Though eastern Kentucky hadn’t flooded like this since 1957, parts of the state could face 100-year floods every 25 years or so. About half of all homes in the region hit hardest by last year’s floods — Knott, Letcher, Perry, and Breathitt counties — are at risk for extreme flooding.
Some residents worry that the legacies of surface mining – lost topsoil and tree cover, a ruined water table, and waste retention dams like the one that may have failed near Lost Creek, drowning it – will make communities more vulnerable to floods, compounding the effects of generational poverty and aging rural infrastructure. Housing needs to be built, and some say it needs to go up on the only high, flat land available — that is, the very same strip mines that contributed mightily to this whole problem in the first place.
High ground, especially former strip mines, in the region tends to be off limits. A study completed in the 1970s showed that most of what is available belongs to land companies, coal companies, and other private interests. About 1.5 million acres is believed to have been mined. Many of those sites are too remote to be of much use for housing, though, and those that are closer to town typically have seen commercial development. As the flood recovery has dragged on, though, some of these entities have decided to donate some of what they hold so that there might be more residential construction. Other parcels have been donated by landowning families with cozy relationships to the coal industry, though that hasn’t always gone smoothly.
Chris Doll is vice president of the Housing Development Alliance, a nonprofit dedicated to building single-family homes for low-income families. It was beating the drum of eastern Kentucky’s crisis long before the flood. The situation is even more dire now. Without an influx of new construction, he argues, the local economy will spiral even further.
On an overcast and gentle day in June, Doll walked around a former strip mine turned planned development in Knott County called Chestnut Ridge. It sits near a four-lane highway and close to other communities, with ready access to water lines. The Alliance is working with other nonprofits to build around 50 houses here, along with, it hopes, 50 to 150 more on each of two similar sites in neighboring counties. A $13 million state flood relief fund has committed $1 million to the projects.
Chris Doll stands in a field in Eastern Kentucky.
Grist / Katie Myers
The road leading to what could, in just a few years, be a bustling neighborhood opened up into a bafflingly flat landscape, almost like a wooded savanna. It was wide open to the sunshine, unlike the deep hollers and coves that characterize this part of eastern Kentucky. To an untrained eye, it appeared to be a healthy ecosystem. Look closer, though, and one sees the mix of vegetation coal companies use to restore the land: invasive autumn olive, scrubby pine trees, and tall grasses, planted mostly for erosion control.
Still, it’s ideal land for housing, and most folks around here won’t mind the landscaping. Doll said the number of people who need help is overwhelming, and his team can’t help everybody. But they hope to build as many houses as they can.
“There are so many people that have so many needs that I am of the mindset that I will help the person in front of me,” Doll said. “And now we can turn them into homeowners. If that’s what they want.”
On a hillside overlooking another mine site, Doll and I walked up to the ridge to see if we could get a better view of the terrain. It is covered in a thicket of brush, too dense to see beyond. The path wound toward a small clearing, where worn headstones and stone angels sit undisturbed. Family cemeteries are protected from strip mining, and this one was clearly still cared for; the bouquets at the angels’ feet were fresh. The lifecycle of coal had come and made its mark and gone.
Chestnut ridge is a former strip mine turned planned development in Knott County, Kentucky. Grist / Katie Myers
“You can see where they cut out,” Doll said. “They just entirely destroyed that mountain. It’s such a wild thing to think that strip mine land is going to be part of the solution.”
Doll thinks of it as a post-apocalyptic landscape, or maybe mid-apocalyptic, ripe for renewal, but still carrying the weight of its past. The land was gifted by people whose money was made from coal, after all.
“And, you know, it’s great that they’re giving land back,” he said. “I would prefer if it was still mountains, but if it was mountains, we couldn’t build houses on it. So yeah, it’s ridiculously complex.” He shrugged. “Bigger heads than mine.”
He squelched across the mud and back to the car. In the summer heat, two turkeys retreated into the shade of a scrubby pine grove, their tracks etched in the mud alongside hoofprints, probably from deer and elk. The place was alive, if not exactly the way it was before.
The former strip mine developments are financed in part by the Team Kentucky flood relief fund created by the governor’s office. Beyond the four projects already in motion, eastern Kentucky housing nonprofits like the Housing Development Alliance are working with landowners, local officials and the governor to secure more land in hopes of building hundreds more homes.
“Working together – and living for one another – we’ve weathered this devastating storm,” Governor Andy Beshear said last week during a press conference outlining progress made since the flood. “Now, a year later, we see the promise of a brighter future, one with safer homes and communities as well as new investments and opportunities.”
That said, nothing is fully promised just yet, and the process could take years. The homes will be owner-occupied and residents will carry a mortgage, but housing advocates hope to lower as many barriers to ownership as possible and help families with grants and loans. Applications for the developments are expected to open within a couple of months. The plans, thus far, call for an “Appalachian look and feel” that combines an old-style coal camp town and a suburban subdivision to create single-family homes clustered in wooded hollers. Though some might argue that density should be the priority, local housing nonprofits want developments that feel like home to people used to having a bit of land for themselves.
The Housing Development Alliance has built houses on mined land before, and some of them are among those given to 12 flood survivors thus far. Alongside other entities, it has also spent the year mucking, gutting, and repairing salvageable homes, often upgrading them with flood-safe building protocols. Even that comparatively small number was made possible through support from a hodgepodge of local and regional nonprofits, and the labor of the Alliance’s carpenters has been supplanted with volunteer help.
Though the Knott County Sportsplex, a recreation center built on the mineland next to Chestnut Ridge, appears to be sinking and cracking a bit, Doll said houses are too light to cause that kind of trouble. Nonetheless, geotechnical engineers from the University of Kentucky, he said, are studying the land to make sure there won’t be any unpleasant surprises. The plan is for the neighborhoods to be mapped out onto the landscape with roads and sewer lines and streetlights, all of which require the involvement of myriad county departments and private companies; then the Alliance and its partners will come in and do what they do best, ideally as further disaster funding comes down the line.
Still, all involved say that there’s no way they can build enough houses to fill the need.
A flood-damaged building sits vacant in Lost Creek, Kentucky.
Grist / Katie Myers
More federal funding will arrive soon through the U.S. Housing and Urban Development disaster relief block grant program. It allocated $300 million to the region, and organizations like the Kentucky River Area Development District are gathering the information needed to prove to the feds the scale of the region’s need. Some housing advocates are critical of this process, though.
Noah Patton, a senior policy analyst with the Low-Income Housing Coalition, said HUD grants are too unpredictable to forge long-term plans. “One reason it’s exceptionally complicated is because it is not permanently authorized,” he said. A president can declare a disaster and direct the agency to release funds, but Congress must approve the disbursement. Although it all went smoothly in Kentucky’s case, the unpredictability means there are no standing rules on how to allocate and spend funding.
“Oftentimes, you’re kind of starting from scratch every time there’s a disaster,” Patton said.
Local development districts, such as the Kentucky River Area Development District, are holding meetings around the affected counties, urging people to fill out surveys so it can collect the data needed to apply for funding from the federal program. And HUD is overhauling its efforts to address criticism of unequal distribution of funds. Still, the people who might benefit from these block grants may not see the homes they’ll underwrite go up for a few more years, Patton said.
On the state level, housing advocates have been pushing the legislature for more money to flow toward permanent housing. Many also say the combined state, FEMA and HUD assistance isn’t nearly enough. One analysis by Eric Dixon of the Ohio River Valley Institute, a nonprofit think tank, pegged the cost of a complete recovery at around $453 million for a “rebuild where we were” approach and more than $957 million to incorporate climate-resilient building techniques and, where necessary, move people to higher ground.
Sasha Gibson has heard rumors of the new developments. She’s somewhat interested insofar as they can get her out of limbo. Until she sees these houses going up, though, they’ll be just another vague promise in a year of vague promises that have gotten her nowhere but a dusty ATV park. It’s been, to put it bluntly, a terrible year, and the moments where the family’s had hope have only made the letdowns feel worse.
“I have no hope to rely on other people,” she said. “I don’t want to give somebody else that much power over me. Because then you’ll just wind up disappointed and sad. And it’s even sadder when you have all of these little eyes looking at you.”
As Gibson waits, others long ago decided to remain where they were and rebuild either because they could or because there wasn’t another choice.
Tony Potter, who’s lived on family land in the city of Fleming-Neon since birth, has spent the past year in what amounts to a tool shed. It’s cramped and doesn’t even have a sink, but the land under it belongs to him, not a landlord or bank. It’s a piece of the world that he owns, and because a monthly disability check is his only income, he doesn’t have much else and probably couldn’t afford a mortgage or rent. Asked if he’d consider moving, he scoffed.
“You put yourself in my shoes,” he said.
Tony Potter, who’s lived on family land in the city of Fleming-Neon since birth, says he won’t consider leaving. Grist / Katie Myers
He can’t believe FEMA would offer to buy someone’s land, or that anyone would take the government up on the offer. “I mean, my God, why in the hell you wanna buy the property and then tell them they can’t live on it?” he said. “What kind of fool would sell their property? Why would you want to sell something and then go rent something?”
James Hall, who also lives in Neon, lost everything but is staying put, in part because he doesn’t think it’ll happen again. The words “thousand-year flood” must mean something, he said. But that didn’t keep him from putting his new trailer a foot and a half higher just in case. He might bump that up to 3 feet when he has a minute. Through it all, he’s kept his dry sense of humor. “If the flood comes again,” he said, “I’m gonna get me a houseboat.”
That kind of outlook buoys Ricky Burke, the town’s mayor. He said the community’s used to flooding – the city sits in a floodplain at the intersection of the Wrights Fork and Yonta Fork creeks – but last year’s was by far the worst. Water and mud plowed through town with enough force to shatter windows. People went without water and electricity for months in some places. A few buildings, like the burger drive-in on the corner at the edge of town, have been repaired, but others remain gaunt and empty.
Still, Burke, a diesel mechanic who was elected in November, is confident the town will pick itself up. He’s heard talk that Neon might need to move some of its buildings, that a return to form simply isn’t viable. He’s dismissive of such a notion. What Neon needs, he believes, is a big party, and he’s planning to celebrate the community’s resilience with flowers, music, and a gathering on the anniversary of the flood.
“These people in Neon ain’t going nowhere,” he said.
A sign hangs above Neon’s main street.
Grist / Katie Myers
Some folks, through persistence, hard work, and a bit of luck, have moved into new homes.
Linda and Danny Smith got theirs from Christian Aid Ministries, a Mennonite disaster relief group, though construction started a couple months later than planned because it ended up taking awhile to figure out exactly where the floodplain was. It was built on their land at the end of a Knott County road called, whimsically, Star Wars Way. According to the Smiths, the group, which was from out of state, nearly ran out of time before having to return home and only just finished the job before leaving. They left so quickly that Danny Smith said he still needed to paint the doors. He isn’t complaining, though. Other homes were left half-done, their new owners left searching high and low for someone to finish the job.
Although grateful for the help that put a roof over his head, Smith got a little tired of dealing with all the people who came to heal his body, his spirit, and his mind even as he completed mounds of paperwork and made calls to anyone he thought might help. “One guy, he kept insisting that I needed to go talk to someone,” he recalled. “And I said ‘who?’”
Linda and Danny Smith stand in the kitchen of their new home. Parker Hobson
The man suggested that Danny talk to a therapist. He laughed at the recollection. It was a laugh heard often around here, the sound of a tired survivor who’s already assessed their own hierarchy of needs many times over. “I said, ‘You know, I don’t need nothing done with my mind. I need a home.”
Despite the frustration, the Smiths are piecing their lives back together, a little bit higher up off the ground than they were before. Christine White is praying for a similar outcome, and thinks she can finally see it on the horizon. The occasional nightmare aside, she’s felt pretty good these days.
FEMA gave her $1,900 awhile back to demolish her house and closed her case, leaving her high and dry. She called housing organization after housing organization until CORE, a national nonprofit that assists underserved communities, agreed to build a small home on a piece of land she owns in Floyd County. Construction began earlier this month. White, who spends her time volunteering at a local food bank, calls it a miracle. “You just gotta go where the Lord leads you,” she says. But it’s not built yet, so she’s trying not to count her chickens.
Census: Rural Americans Have Higher Rates of Disabilities Than Urban Dwellers
U.S. Census numbers show that higher rates of rural Americans have a disability than urban Americans.
In 2021, nearly 15% of rural residents reported having a disability, compared to 12.6% of urban people, according to the U.S. Census.
“It really doesn’t surprise me,” said Dan Kessler, interim executive director of Association of Programs for Rural Independent Living, also known as APRIL. “When you look at rural areas, in terms of disability, there are many factors. I think one of those could very well be just access to health care…. Looking at primary care, where you may see a physician for a number of issues, for example, your diabetes or, or some other condition, which, if left untreated, could very well result in someone acquiring a long term disability.”
Kessler added that the digital divide also impacts access to medical care.
According to the Census numbers, in 2021, the South had the nation’s highest rates of disability at 13.8%. That was followed by the Midwest (13.1%), the Northeast (12.3%), and the West (12.1%).
“A lot of people age into a disability,” Mary WIllard, director of Training and Technical Assistance at APRIL told the Daily Yonder. “We talk about disability, it is really from that birth to dirt kind of a spectrum. And so I would say aging into disability, it’s a big thing in rural areas that’s been happening.”
She added that the surveys have also changed how they ask the questions, which may impact numbers.
“We’re starting to see a bigger breadth of people now disclosing on the Census, as well. So that’s … some of it’s just semantics, I think, disclosing I have a disability versus I might have difficulty walking,” Willard said.
Kessler told the Daily Yonder housing is another factor. “If you have affordable, accessible, safe housing, that can have a direct impact on your health care and your well being,” he said.
WIllard added that in many rural areas, the housing stock is older, making it harder to retrofit for people, especially with the increased costs for building materials associated with the pandemic.
Direct care workers also may not get paid for the travel time from rural client to rural client, making it less financially feasible, she added.
Still, there are positives, Willard said.
“I think rural America, especially post pandemic, has become more appealing to people with disabilities, especially if you’re immunocompromised,” she said.
Willard also mentioned the program AgrAbility, which works to enhance the quality of life for farmers, ranchers, and other agricultural workers with disabilities.
“I think more programs like that are helping people with disabilities to really live the rural agricultural life that they want to,” she said.
For Decades, the Top Rural Health Issue Has Been Access to Basic Care; Now It’s Mental Health and Addiction
For the first time in 20 years, mental health and addiction are more pressing health concerns than getting access to basic healthcare, according to a survey of rural stakeholders.
Rural Healthy People 2030, released by the Southwest Rural Health Resource Center, surveyed a national sample of people “working to improve the lives and health of rural Americans,” to determine the most important issues facing rural residents. Participants included people working in health care, public administration, education, human services, and other fields.
In 2010 and 2020, the biggest issue in the survey was access to health care.
While access to health care remained one of the top five issues according to survey respondents, researchers said, the growing impact of mental health and addiction took the number one and two spots on the list regardless of age, race, region or occupation.
“For the past two decades, health-care access has been, far and away, the most important topic no matter how we cut the data,” said Timothy Callaghan, one of the survey authors. “The fact that mental health and addiction came out ahead of health-care access this time… certainly surprised us, but when you start thinking about the context of the past decade and the context of the pandemic in which you launched the survey, the findings are a bit less surprising.”
Callaghan said the rise of the opioid epidemic prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, and the growing recognition of the lack of mental health resources in rural America since the pandemic may be part of the reason. But changes in health care through the Affordable Care Act may have improved health-care access, bringing other issues to the top of the list, Callaghan said.
According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, nearly 20 million people signed up for insurance as part of the Affordable Care Act during open enrollment this past year. During 2022, 35 million people signed up for insurance during the open enrollment period, 21 million of whom were part of Medicaid expansions.
Still the fact that mental health and addiction rose to the top across all categories was striking, he said.
“You’re going to see small changes in characteristics over the course of decades,” he said. “But the extent to which mental health and addiction have risen and were so consistently selected by stakeholders, demonstrates how big those issues really are.”
Stakeholders may have been focusing on what were the most pressing needs given the moment, Callaghan said. The survey was presented to stakeholders 2021. Partnering with rural health organizations like the National Rural Health Association, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Hospital Association, and the National Association of Rural Health Clinics, the research center sent out links to the survey and asked stakeholders to comment. In addition, the center sent the survey to people who had filled out the survey in previous decades and asked stakeholders to identify others they felt may be able to provide insight.
According to the Pew Research Center, an estimated 40% of American adults suffered from increased mental health issues during the pandemic. A survey done by the Kaiser Family Foundation and CNN found that 90% of the American public felt the country was facing a mental health crisis. Adults across the country during the pandemic reported increased symptoms of anxiety, depression, hopelessness and sadness and suicidal ideation, as well as increased drug and alcohol use.
In all, 1,291 respondents answered at least one of the questions between July 2021 and February 14, 2022.
“I think part of (the rankings) could be that a lot of the rural stakeholders participating understood that we’re looking at 10 year trends,” he said. “Our data didn’t allow us to identify specifically why, for example, vaccination isn’t in the top 20 even though we might have expected it to be, due to the pandemic.”
Major concerns besides health-care access in previous surveys included heart disease and stroke, diabetes, and nutrition.
“We’ve seen some pretty considerable gains in heart disease deaths,” Callaghan said. “We still do have a gap between urban and rural America, but there have been some pretty considerable gains.”
Callaghan said it’s not clear if that is because rural health-care providers are better at managing the disease, or educating patients about the diseases, or if other topics have just become more important.
For now, Callaghan said, the study reveals where the focus of rural health systems should be, according to rural health stakeholders.
“We now have a better sense of the areas that are particularly in need of rural health investment,” he said. “We now know that addressing addiction and addressing mental health issues have become increasingly important to rural experts over the past decade and while health-care access remains important… we nonetheless have to start prioritizing the issues that are most important which are addiction and mental health.”
Piccola Cucina has five restaurants: three in New York City, one in Ibiza, Spain, and one in Red Lodge, Montana, population 2,200.
Red Lodge anchors one end of the spectacular Beartooth Highway and is a gateway community for Yellowstone National Park. Visiting the park requires driving through Beartooth Pass, which, at over 10,000 feet, closes for the winter. The town is primarily a summer destination, and Piccola Cucina Ox Pasture (the delineation for the Montana location) is seasonal as well.
This restaurant outpost is thanks to the urging of guests at a New York City location, residents of Red Lodge who wanted to bring the dining experience to their hometown. Chef Benedetto Bisacquino ventured from the city six years ago to check out the possibilities.
Finding Community — and Diners — in Rural Montana
“We were curious, but weren’t supposed to stay long,” he said about that first visit. “But people really enjoy what we are doing and this town is like home now.”
‘What they’re doing’ is serving deliciously authentic Sicilian and Italian food. Bisacquino is clear — no dishes that aren’t served in Italy. That excludes American favorites like chicken parmesan and fettucine alfredo. At first, almost everything was new and different for patrons, even the lasagna with meat sauce and bechamel.
Bisacquino has gradually expanded diners’ palates with a different special every night, surprising people with original Italian food like rice balls and raw fish. They often think the octopus appetizer will be chewy, but are surprised by how much they enjoy it.
Now people come to the restaurant expressly for it and it the appetizer is a menu staple. In this way, diners have learned to arrive at Piccola Cucina with a sense of adventure.
Chef Bendetto Bisacquino of Piccola Cucina Ox Pasture in Red Lodge, Montana. (Photo provided)
“Last year, all the people in a big group ordered the yellowtail tuna and I couldn’t believe they all liked raw fish,” he said. “After six years, so many people trust what we are doing that they will try all of our plates.”
An Authentic Sicilian Experience at Piccola Cucina
Bisacquino is a stickler for authentic ingredients. For example, Bucatini Cacio E Pepe (bucatini pasta with pecorino cheese and black pepper) has only a few ingredients and relies on the high quality of each one. Since these are hard to find in rural Montana, he imports a lot of things from Europe: octopus, giant wheels of pecorino cheese, artichokes, and yellow tomatoes. It makes the dishes truly Sicilian. He complements them with locally-raised 16 oz. grilled rib eye, since Montana is known for its world-class beef.
Piccola Cucina offers more than a taste of Sicily; it also offers an experience of the culture. The ambience is boisterous, with music and dancing accompanying the food, and the chef and staff – many with an Italian accent – mingling and talking with the guests. It adds to the feel of adventurous dining.
Bisacquino grew up in Sicily and started working in a restaurant kitchen at the age of 13. In the following 29 years, he has worked across Europe and in Egypt, including a stint cooking French food in Switzerland. Ten years ago, he was invited to New York and a return to the cuisine of his heritage at Piccola Cucina. His goal as a chef is to make the best food and make people happy. “This job is hard work, and feeling people love what I am doing makes it worth it,” he said.
Arancini Catanesi, a Sicilian rice ball dish with meat ragu and mozzarella. (Photo provided)Tagliatelle with shrimp and zucchini. (Photo provided)
Business is Booming, and Rural Charm Abounds
The arrival of the restaurant was well-timed, catching the cusp of a growth surge in Red Lodge. The beautiful, quiet mountain town was a strong community forged through hard winters. In recent years, the increase in seasonal residents and tourists has generated a hopping summer scene. People spend a couple of days in town while visiting Yellowstone. Guests from Billings, Bozeman, and Cody visit for a long weekend, or drive two to three hours just to eat at Piccola Cucina. In the first year, 13,000 people dined at the restaurant in three months. Two years ago, they served 25,000.
Since the New York locations tend to slow down in the summer, Bisacquino says some of the staff shift to Red Lodge for the season. “New York is beautiful but everything goes so fast there,” he said. “Red Lodge is a break, a chance to enjoy the summer a little bit. It offers a different way to work.”
Rural SNAP Recipients Will Have Harder Time with Return to Work Requirements
More than 1.7 million rural Americans live in counties where there aren’t enough jobs for people who want them, making it harder for SNAP recipients to meet work requirements that were reinstated when the federal pandemic emergency declaration ended.
Able-bodied adults without dependents must work 80 hours or more per month to continue receiving benefits through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps. The Trump administration suspended the requirement at the start of the pandemic, and the old requirements resumed in May.
The burden of meeting the work requirement may be more challenging in rural areas, which on average have fewer jobs, greater transportation needs, and less access to broadband. The work requirement was waived during the federal pandemic emergency. But rural America still doesn’t have as many jobs as it did before Covid-19.
“We know there are a lot of people who struggle in the economy who want full-time jobs but can’t get them,” said Ellen Vollinger, SNAP director at the nonprofit Food Research & Action Center (FRAC). “It may well be an issue in rural areas where people want the full time work, but they can’t find those hours or find a full-time job.”
States can ask for area waivers from the Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) so work requirements don’t apply to areas without enough jobs. But some states restrict governors from requesting waivers.
A Third of Labor Surplus Areas Are in Rural Counties
The United States Department of Labor maintains a list of Labor Surplus Areas (LSA), or places where there are not enough jobs for the working age population. Researchers and federal agencies can use the list for a variety of purposes, including to identify where federal funding should be emphasized.
“The reason the labor department has such a list [of LSAs] is to help guide the federal government… to invest in those persistently struggling economic areas,” Vollinger said.
But living in an LSA may be more burdensome for people who live in rural areas where fewer households have access to things like broadband internet or reliable transportation to get to job interviews, says Vollinger. The price of fuel can also be higher in rural communities where there’s not as much competition for gas stations, adding another layer of challenge for people already struggling to meet the monthly work requirements.
How Labor Surplus Areas Are Defined
The Department of Labor can define an Labor Surplus Area at three geographic scales. They refer to these varying scales as civil jurisdictions.
A civil jurisdiction can be a city or town of at least 25,000 residents, a county, or a balance of county, which is a county excluding a city or town within it. For example, a balance of Calhoun County, Alabama, would be the entire county of Calhoun except for the city of Anniston, which is inside it.
To qualify as a Labor Surplus Area, a civil jurisdiction must have an unemployment rate 20% or higher than the national average for two years. But in cases where the national rate is above 10% or below 6%, then the qualifying rate is set at either 6%or 10%. In the 2022 fiscal year, there were 278 LSAs in the contiguous United States.
Time Limits on SNAP
Able bodied people without dependents between the ages of 18 and 50 are eligible for three months of benefits every three years without an employment requirement. But after that 90 day period, people have to work at least 20 hours per week to continue receiving benefits.
But for the recipients who live in places with insufficient jobs, that’s easier said than done. A 2022 survey of 25,000 American adults found that the most common reason people are unemployed is because of job availability. Twenty-eight percent of survey respondents said that there were no jobs that were good fits in terms of geography, wages, or hours of employment.
East Carroll Parish, Louisiana, for example, is a rural LSA in the Mississippi Delta. In 2021, 30% of households were receiving SNAP benefits, compared to only 14% of the total rural population, according to recent estimates.
Exceptions to the Rule
States can apply for waivers from the federal government to eliminate the SNAP time constraints in areas with insufficient employment. Insufficient employment is a vague term, so it’s up to the discretion of the federal government and state policymakers to determine eligibility on a case by case basis.
Governors make the waiver requests, and they will often use the LSA list to justify need in certain areas of the state. The FNS can then exempt those areas from the normal constraints. That means people who live in LSAs can remain on SNAP for longer than three months regardless of whether they meet employment requirements.
But Governors are not required to ask for waivers. And in some states, legislation actually prohibits them from doing so. In April of this year, Republican Governor Brad Little of Idaho signed a bill that increased the work requirement in the state from 20 to 30 hours per week.
“Many states did a good job of using area waivers,” Volling said. “But several states, mainly in the Southeast, chose not to use the area waivers.”
Mississippi prohibits work requirements waivers on the basis of job availability. Twenty-four percent of Mississippi households in a county with an LSA received SNAP benefits in 2021. Over 160,000 people live in an LSA in Mississippi, but if they are of working age and without dependents, they still have to meet work requirements to continue getting benefits.
“It’s a really harsh and arbitrary provision,” Vollinger said.
Railway Safety Bills Need to Ensure Rural Areas Get Help, Experts Say
Rail-safety bills that Congress is considering in response to this year’s catastrophic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, need a guarantee that rural communities will get the help they need to deal with their increased risk for derailments, a policy expert says.
“If you look at the history of these catastrophic derailments, they’re overwhelmingly happening in rural places and in small towns across the country,” said Anne Junod, senior research associate at the nonpartisan think tank the Urban Institute, in an interview with the Daily Yonder. Her research informed the railway safety legislation being considered in the Senate.
Last week the National Transportation Safety Board held a hearing near the site of February’s East Palestine, Ohio, derailment, which resulted toxic-chemical fires that lasted two days and forced evacuations. Also last week, liquid asphalt leaked into the Yellowstone River in Montana after a train derailment and railroad bridge collapse over the river.
Rural train derailments incur the highest average damage costs, at just over $362,000 per derailment, according to a Daily Yonder analysis. This is compared to an average of $115,000 in major metropolitan areas and about $200,000 in medium-sized metropolitan areas.
Despite the likelihood and severity of rural train derailments, rural communities are less equipped than cities to adequately respond, according to Junod. This is because rail companies are not required to provide information about the contents of a derailed train to the community affected, leaving that outreach up to local officials.
“Right now, it's on the community to get a hold of the railroad, and say, ‘what was the material that is now on fire in our community?’” Junod said. “The different types of hazardous materials will dictate the way that you respond and try to control the fire or prevent an explosion.”
For rural areas where emergency response programs are often volunteer-led and more limited in capacity, conducting this outreach can be difficult when they’re already “punching well above their weight” to adequately respond to a disaster, Junod said.
This was the case in rural East Palestine, Ohio, where a train carrying chemicals used to make plastic derailed and spilled into the local waterways. Residents within a mile of the crash were under a temporary evacuation order in case of an explosion.
Reporting from CNN found that most of the firefighters who responded to the disaster were volunteers and did not have the necessary equipment to safely deal with a hazardous chemical spill.
Nor did they know exactly what they were responding to: While the public was alerted of a vinyl chloride spill immediately after the derailment, Norfolk Southern, the train’s operator, did not disclose what the other hazardous chemicals spilled were until a week later when the company submitted a remedial action work plan to the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency.
And not all affected agencies and jurisdictions were made aware of the derailment. In a letter to the president of Norfolk Southern, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro wrote that the company failed to implement Unified Command, a multi-agency or multi-jurisdictional process that involves coordinated response from agencies and organizations that service the areas affected by a disaster.
Norfolk Southern decided to burn five of the derailed train cars containing vinyl chloride to avoid an uncontrolled explosion but did not consult Pennsylvania officials before making this decision (East Palestine is just one mile from the Pennsylvania border).
“Failure to adhere to well-accepted standards of practice related to incident management and prioritizing an accelerated and arbitrary timeline to reopen the rail line injected unnecessary risk and created confusion in the [remediation] process,” Governor Shapiro wrote.
Rail Safety Legislation Is Underway
On June 21, 2023, the Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration announced a proposed rule that would require railroads to maintain information about hazardous material shipments. The database would be accessible to authorized emergency response personnel.
All emergency responders authorized, licensed, or otherwise permitted by a state to conduct emergency response activities in their community would have access to the hazardous materials information in the event of a rail accident, according to an agency spokesperson. This means a rural volunteer fire department, for example, would have access as long as they are permitted by the town, county, or state to conduct emergency response operations.
The proposed rule adds to other railway safety legislation already under consideration in Congress in the wake of the East Palestine derailment.
The RAIL Act, introduced in the House by Ohio Representative Bill Johnson on March 17, would require hotbox detectors be placed every 10 miles on railways used to transport hazardous materials. These detectors monitor how hot a train’s wheels are, which when overheated, can cause breakage and result in a derailed train, as was the case in East Palestine. The legislation would also provide grant funding for hazardous material training for first responders.
The Railway Safety Act of 2023, introduced in the Senate by Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown on March 1, would also require wayside defect detectors – a monitoring system on railroad tracks that includes hotbox detectors – be used for every train carrying hazardous materials. Railway companies would be required to provide state emergency response commissioners with advance notice about what hazardous materials are moving through their communities.
While the bills are a good starting point, said Junod from the Urban Institute, they don’t go far enough to meet rural communities where they are. The federal funding from these bills would likely be disseminated through grants, which can be a barrier for rural communities who don’t have paid staff to apply for these grants.
“If [these bills] don't have a kind of rural guarantee, they're gonna face further challenges in accessing these really needed resources,” Junod said.
