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| Beattyville, Kentucky earlier this week. Photo by Donnie Benton. |
Combine weather calamities with impoverished cities in areas that the media finds easy to ignore, and you have real tragedy.
Two such disasters in recent days come to mind. Neither of which you might have heard of.
Parts of eastern Kentucky, especially around Beattyville, a small city of about 1,300 people, were under water this week.
An even bigger disaster is ongoing in Jackson, Mississippi, where municipal water has been in short supply or nonexistent since the mid-February freeze. In both cases, victims of the disasters have been too much left to their own devices, with not enough help.
BEATTYVILLE
Let's start with Kentucky. Floods are pretty common in the steep, hilly terrain of eastern Kentucky. When it rains hard, water roars down those steep slopes much as it does here in Vermont.
Last weekend, the rain came down especially hard, and flood water rose throughout much of Kentucky and surrounding areas.
According to the Lexington Herald Leader:
"Beattyville, where the three forks of the Kentucky River come together, was underwater in 'major, unprecedented' flooding according to Lee County Emergency Management......Beattyville police said the water was beginning to subside on inundated Main Street early Tuesday, but several roads were still impassable."
Most of the town was under water during the peak of the flooding Monday. Water flowed six or seven feet through the main street of town. Water entered most if not all businesses, and inundated the local ambulance building. At least they were able to move the ambulances out of the way before the water rose.
All this was the last thing the impoverished community needed.
As of 2019, at least 45 percent of Beattyville residents were below the poverty line. It has been described as the poorest majority white town in the nation.
Coal, oil and tobacco made Beattyville a prosperous town in the 19th century and a good part of the 20th. But most of those jobs are gone. The small city fell into poverty, and its residents hard hit by the opioid epidemic
Now, what's left of the town has been practically destroyed by a flood. Coal's not coming back. I imagine tobacco won't either. True, people could move out of Beattyville in search for better opportunities, but I'm betting most people there have neither the means nor desire to do so.
I'm sure Beattyville and the rest of eastern Kentucky will eventually receive some disaster assistance from the federal government. They've been so beaten down by circumstances, and bad luck and life, that it'll make it harder or impossible for some residents to ever recover.
I don't have any kind of magic want to fix all the ails Beattyville and similar impoverished towns it by disaster. But a first step is to pay attention.
JACKSON
The plight of Jackson, Mississippi finally started getting national media attention in the past couple of days, at least more attention than the problems in Kentucky.
Trouble is, Jackson suffered through a dangerous water supply outage for two weeks before most of us started paying any notice.
Jackson, a majority Black city of about 160,000, like many Southern cities, was blasted hard by the Arctic cold wave in mid-February.
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| Water distribution in Jackson, Mississippi after the citys water system failed for weeks from damage in the mid-February freeze and winter storms. |
The city's aging infrastructure couldn't handle temperatures that fell as low as 14 and stayed below freezing for nearly four days.
At least 80 frozen water mains burst, and Jackson is still not very close to solving its resulting acute water shortage.
While many people in Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas are still dealing with damaged homes, broken pipes and other suffering from the cold wave, those areas are more or less recovering.
Jackson is not. Three weeks after the freeze, one fourth of the city has no running water, notes the Associated Press.
Some of the water main breaks have been fixed, but not all of them. The city is under a boil water notice, at least in places where there's water at all. People and organizations are now donating water as a stopgap, but lugging home jugs and bottles of water for all of a household's needs range from exceedingly difficult to impossible.
Try imposing these conditions on a frail, elderly woman. Or a family with several children. Or on people who live paycheck to paycheck on substandard wages
It's telling, at least to me, that the worst of the water problems on the mostly south and west side of town. It's not as bad on the mostly white east and north side of Jackson, according to CNN.
Jackson's infrastructure is old and decrepit, which is common in places that politicians and so-called leaders ignore. Tax cuts for the super wealthy seem more important than the life or death struggles of people working poverty wage jobs
The City of Jackson's Facebook page had this comment, which seems to sum up a lot of what people are thinking in Jackson, as reported by CNN:
"'They have had over three years to fix the problem what is their excuse,' wrote user Bettye Franklin. 'If this was a White city I guarantee you it would be fixed.'"
The city of Jackson wants to add another cent to the tax rate to fund the water system, but Mississippi's Republican governor would have to approve it. He's not inclined to, because there's an unwritten rule among Republicans to never raise taxes, no matter how critical the need may be.
SUMMARY
Major news outlets, love 'em or hate 'em, tend to focus attention and get results for places in trouble. For leaders, for the lazy, for the indifferent politicians, the media spotlight tends to get people off their duff.
The trouble is, the immediate crisis will eventually fade, and the media spotlight will move on. Which will mean none of the problems that made these disasters worse than they had to be will be fixed. Then, in the next disaster, we'll once again be talking about these underlying factors that made things ever so much worse.
Rinse and repeat.
The United States has turned into a bit of an oligarchy. Some of our leaders do the bidding exclusively for their very wealthy donors, and not to the general population.
These same "leaders" so often manage to get constituents to vote against their self interest through fear. They create bogeymen. The people who want to help will turn us into the train wreck that is Venezuela, when its the "leaders" kowtowing to the billionaires that are really venezuelizing us. (There you go, I invented a word).
I'm not sure how this ends, but we as a nation have developed quite a knack for turning disasters into bigger calamities than they need to be.
As climate change continues on, weather disasters will very likely keep getting more frequent and nasty. And more people will die and suffer needlessly.
Yes, this post is a downer. So do something about it.
For what it's worth, here's what Beattyville, Kentucky looked like at the start of this week:
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