How Coal Mining and Years of Neglect Left Kentucky Towns at the Mercy of Flooding

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https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/04/us/kentucky-flooding-coal-industry.html

By Rick Rojas, Christopher Flavelle and Campbell Robertson, The New York Times. 

Excerpt: FLEMING-NEON, Ky. — ...For much of the last century, the country was powered by the labor of coal miners underneath the hills and mountains of southeastern Kentucky. But the landscape that was built to serve this work was fragile, leaving the people here extraordinarily vulnerable, especially after the coal industry shuttered so many of the mines and moved on. What remained were modest, unprotected homes and decaying infrastructure, and a land that itself, in many places, had been shorn of its natural defenses. Last week, when a deluge of rain poured into the hollows, turning creeks into roaring rivers, overwhelming old flood records, killing at least 37 people and destroying countless homes, that vulnerability was made brutally manifest.… 

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