8 of 9 U.S. counties most declared federal disaster areas are in Kentucky

Floyd County keeps flooding and the federal government keeps coming to the rescue.

In July 2022, at least 40 people died and 300 homes were damaged when the eastern Kentucky county flooded. It was the 13th time in 12 years that the rural county was declared a federal disaster. These are disasters so costly that local governments feel they can’t pay for it all, so the governor asks the president to declare a disaster freeing up federal funds.

“After that flood I had 500 homeless people looking at me, ‘Judge what are we going to do’?” recalled Judge Robbie Williams, administrator for the county of a bit more than 35,000 people. “It’s overwhelming and it’s just a matter of time before it happens again.”

It did. In 2023, Floyd County was declared a disaster again for 14th time, starting in 2011. And Floyd County isn’t even the nation’s most disaster-prone county. Neighboring Johnson County has 15 disasters declared by the Federal Emergency Management Agency since 2011.

Eight of the nine counties with the most federal declared disasters since 2011 — more than a dozen each — are in Kentucky, with the one in Vermont. These counties have four to five times the number of disaster as the national average of three in the past 13 years.

When it comes to extreme weather and other so-called natural disasters, people generally look to the hurricane or earthquake-prone coasts and say that’s where the danger is. But that’s not where the highest concentration of federally declared disasters are, according to an atlas of 713 FEMA declared disasters created by Rebuild by Design and New York University. While most people in disasters think about federal government direct financial help to individual victims to pay for lost housing and businesses, the atlas focuses on the $60 billion pot of FEMA aid to governments.

“California and Louisiana and I would say now even Texas, Florida, for sure, they soak up all the oxygen when you hear about these giant storms,” said atlas creator Amy Chester, director of the disaster prevention-focused Rebuild By Design nonprofit group. “But what you’re not hearing about are these storms that are happening all the time, and that’s just becoming like, regular to places like Vermont.” Chester also mentioned Tennessee, Oklahoma, Missisippi, Iowa and Alaska as hotspots.

Flooding is the most common disaster in the United States, according to FEMA. Since 2011, FEMA handed out more than $41 billion in aid following hurricanes, the most of any disaster type.

In Floyd County, geography and government regulations make it tough, Williams said. The mountain-heavy county has people living in the narrow valley floor in old coal camps, he said. And when it rains, the ever-shallower creeks overflows. Environmental regulations won’t let local officials dredge the creeks, which keep getting built up with silt coming down the mountains, often from development, Williams said. Some creeks decades ago were 20 feet deep but are now shallow enough to walk across, he said.

The problem is there is nowhere for the rain to go,” Williams said.

National Weather Service data shows that Floyd County now averages more than 50 inches of rain a year, up from 42 to 43 inches a year in the mid 1980s. Warmer air holds more moisture, with studies and statistics showing the Eastern United States is not only getting more rain, but more intense downpours that cause floods.

Floyd County’s government received more than $35 million in FEMA disaster aid since 2011. That’s not even near the top, where the big money went to places devastated by hurricanes.

Five counties — three of them in New York — received more than $1 billion in FEMA aid, led by Manhattan’s New York County, which got $8.9 billion, nearly all of it due to 2012’s Hurricane Sandy. All of the top five counties were struck by one or more hurricanes.



Flooding in 2022 near Quicksand, Kentucky  (Photo Ryan C. Hermens, Lexington Herald-Leader via AP)