The Appalachian Flood Resilience Coalition is meant to engage with policymakers at the local, state and federal level. Their platform includes improving flood mapping and expanding the capacity to respond to disasters locally.
More than a dozen groups across seven Appalachian states are involved in the program.
That includes:
- Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center
- ReImagine Appalachia
- National Wildlife Federation
- Appalachian Voices
- Amphibian and Reptile Conservancy
- The Alliance for Appalachia
- Kentucky Waterways Alliance
- West Virginia Rivers
- Kentucky Conservation Committee
- From Below: Rising Together for Coalfield Justice
- Wetlands Watch
- Kentucky Resources Council
- Pasa Sustainabile Agriculture
“There’s a lot of rural communities that have been experiencing population decline and are already struggling to maintain their public infrastructure, and so when disaster hits that just makes it even harder… I think we have more in common than not,” Rebecca Shelton, Director of Policy at Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center, said.
Many in the coalition originally organized together after the eastern Kentucky flood in 2022, developing a series of policy recommendations in the aftermath. The widespread flood killed 45 people.
“There was just a real hunger for this kind of work,” she said. “A lot of people were asking these same questions, you know, groups in West Virginia that were reeling after one of the 2016 floods. And since then, there have been flood events.”
Shelton says flood resiliency is largely a bipartisan issue. They’re working to keep agencies like the National Weather Service funded, and keep mitigation programs from FEMA in the federal budget.
FEMA announced it would be canceling its Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities flood mitigation grant program earlier this year among a series of federal funding cuts, but a federal judge halted its termination in August.
“I think we will be incorporating even more at the kind of front of this work in the next year, how we try to maintain staffing and important organizations like (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and the National Weather Service to make sure that our communities get adequate warning and good data and information about about upcoming storms,” Shelton said.
Kentucky state lawmakers are also scheduled to meet next Friday in a Disaster Prevention Task Force meeting to discuss how to mitigate future flooding events.
