The wooden cabinets and gray walls, still smelling of fresh paint, could be found in the kitchen of any suburban home. From the window, the neat row of houses in soft blues, reds and greens could unspool along any gravel road.
But stepping onto the back porch, things change. The wind gusts in. The yard is hard-packed, rocky and treeless. The lawn of struggling grass seed suddenly drops off at the edge of a narrow plateau. The land then spills precipitously down into a valley hundreds of feet below before rising back up to another island in the sky.
Decades ago, a cheap form of extraction called mountaintop removal coal mining leveled mountains and shoved the detritus — sugar maples, salamanders, song birds — down hill. While federal law required these moonscapes to be leveled and replanted, reclaimed strip mines no longer resemble mountains. Instead of lush eastern woodlands, they look more like dry western plains.
But in a region defined by steep slopes, these ecological graveyards also provide a startling solution to a problem plaguing residents in the narrow valleys below: the floods.
In 2022, apocalyptic flooding swept across eastern Kentucky, killing 45 people, destroying 542 homes and damaging thousands more. Now, instead of rebuilding in the floodplain, the state is permanently lifting residents onto safer land. Officials are more than two years into a nearly $800 million plan to reclaim these landscapes again, turning them from deserts into developments.
“Climate change is real,” Andy Beshear, the governor of Kentucky, said in an interview last month. “It’s hard to say which natural disaster would or would not have occurred without climate change, because we’ve had some big ones in the past. But what we know is that we see them more often, and sadly, we see them hit a lot of the same places.”