BY ROGER SMITH
MOUNTAIN CITIZEN
MARTIN COUNTY, Ky. — Storms quickly caused a crisis across Martin County as they did across Kentucky, the Midwest and the Midsouth over the weekend. Louisville, Frankfort and Owensboro saw catastrophic flooding, while there were 93 tornadoes in the affected areas of the country. In Martin County, from the head of Meathouse to Rockhouse and Camp Branch, flash floods surged with shocking speed and force, turning the most minor streams into wildly rushing, rapidly rising torrents.
By the time the winds and waters began to subside in Martin County—much sooner than other parts of Kentucky—homes had been damaged, roads had crumbled, and residents were left stranded—some in life-threatening conditions.
Twelve residents were rescued by the Volunteer Fire Department, including an 81-year-old woman trapped in her home on Gayle Carter Road. Floodwaters surrounded her property, and inside, the air was thick with the odor of leaking natural gas. First responders transported her to a hospital.
Elsewhere across the county, the destruction was immediate and widespread. Mudslides buried vehicles, blocked roadways and tore into homes. Roads across Martin County buckled under the pressure. KY-292 suffered multiple breaks, narrowing passage to barely a single lane. On KY-3, the flood snapped a main water line. The Martin County Water District patched the line only to see the roadway collapse again—this time so severely that the soil holding the line was swept away into Rockcastle Creek, making another repair impossible.
County officials scrambled to secure emergency permits from the state to bore beneath the highway and restore service to more than 400 homes. By Tuesday night, the work was still underway, and the residents were still without water. Emergency services were distributing bottled water at Burke’s Body Shop.
Reports of broken infrastructure poured in from nearly every hollow. On Camp Branch, a narrow stream tore the earth from beneath the road after a drain clogged with silt washed down from a recently timbered hillside. In many places, the damage seemed to defy prediction—except, perhaps, to those who have lived through this before.
Martin County Judge/Executive Lon Lafferty has been warning of precisely this kind of disaster. He pointed out the key difference between these flash floods and the Tug River flooding the county endured just two months ago in February.
“This is one of my worst fears for Martin County,” Lafferty said. “When you have flash flooding of small streams like this, people don’t have any time to get out of the way of the flood. River flooding you have some idea—you know it’s coming up, and you have time to get away. When you have small stream flooding like this, that’s when you get loss of life.”
Lafferty said these flash floods aren’t just becoming more frequent—they’re becoming more intense.
“Anybody can tell that. You can see how fast it’s coming up compared to what it did in the past, where it’s going that it never did in the past,” he said.
A medical doctor by training, Lafferty likened the county’s flood problems to a patient experiencing mini-strokes.
“Mini strokes are a warning of a major stroke, a life-threatening, life-altering or deadly stroke,” he said. “And that’s what we’re seeing time and time again. We’re getting warning after warning.”
Lafferty recently participated in a roundtable hosted by Congressman Hal Rogers and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Hazard. The meeting, which included several other county executives, focused on stream cleaning, dredging, permitting and potential mitigation strategies. What stood out to Lafferty was the difference in topography between Martin County and areas like Breathitt and Perry counties, which experienced deadly flooding in 2022.
“What impressed me was that the valleys there are wider than the valleys that we have here. If you drive up in Coldwater Creek and Wolf Creek, Tomahawk, Rockhouse and Pigeon Roost, you will see that essentially people are living right on the streams. And our valleys are more narrow than these other places. What if we had gotten another 2 inches of rain in this last flood? There is no place for us to go. There’s no way of getting out of the way.”
In conversations with other leaders, Lafferty has heard suggestions—well-meaning but impractical—about relocating residents to higher ground.
“They’ll say, ‘Well you need to move up on the mountaintop,’” he recounted. “That would be very difficult to take a person of very limited means, on a fixed income, who has inherited a piece of property from their family, and say, ‘We’ll just move.’ Where are they going to move to and how can they afford that? We don’t own the mountaintops in our county. It’s not like we can just pick up and move.”
The judge is adamant: Martin County needs help before it experiences a loss of life.
“I’m afraid that we are facing a major loss of life in Martin County because our streams can no longer handle the amount of rain that we are experiencing,” he said. “Changing weather patterns or whatever it may be, our streams are filled up. Many of our headwaters have been pushed from one side to the other. If you cut all the trees, there’s nothing to hold the water and it flashes down the stream toward you.”
The silt and sediment clogging the county’s waterways reminded Lafferty of an analogy shared by another judge.
“He said it’s like a bathtub already filled halfway with sand—it just won’t hold as much,” he said. “I agree with his analogy. We have a situation in our headwaters because the valleys have all been pushed together with the hollow fill—and all the timber has been cut. So all the little branches that once meandered in the hollows are gone and there is nothing to hold the water back. It is a bathtub effect.”
And that, Lafferty said, is not a metaphor but an imminent threat.
“We can see the writing on the wall,” he said. “Everybody here knows it; everybody can see it. I don’t want us to wait until we’ve had something major and suffered a loss of life, then come in and try to do something about it. It needs to be done now for the people of Martin County and all of Appalachia before it’s too late.”
In Lafferty’s view, Appalachia has already paid its share.
“We have put forth so much—and yes, it’s a lot of money but we’re talking bout human life. How much is human life worth? Are the lives of the people of Appalachia worth as much as those in the rest of the country? I dare say yes, they are.”
He admitted he is not an engineer or climate scientist but said it does not take one to see what is happening.
“Anybody who lives here saw how quickly the water came up and hit us and that we were blessed that we didn’t have loss of life. You add more inches of rain to what we had and there is no avenue of escape.”
Then, almost as an afterthought, he asked a chilling question: “What if a dam were to burst?”
Last week, the force of the rain filled the Curtis Crum Reservoir to the point that water rushed over its spillway. This uncontrolled overflow ripped up a drain pipe and sent a cascade of water downstream into already-flooded yards and waterways.
Until the flood, Lafferty said he did not realize the state classifies the reservoir as “high hazard C,” meaning failure could lead to loss of life or serious damage to infrastructure. The reservoir is now on the county’s radar.
“It needs to be monitored closely during weather events like this last one,” he said.
Lafferty says he will continue pushing for federal and state funding to clean out streams and take real flood mitigation steps.
“I know it’s expensive, but we’re as deserving as anyone else in this world. It’s a blessing from above that we haven’t had people die in these last two instances. How many inches do you have to have for it to happen? For anyone who cares to hear us: we’re in desperate need, in a dire situation. How many warnings have to be given before we realize that it is? I’ve never seen water like this before. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
As of Tuesday morning, state officials confirmed that four people had died in flooding across Kentucky. Days of relentless rain brought catastrophic flooding to Louisville, Frankfort and western Kentucky.
