Wooden cabinets and gray walls that still smell fresh color are located in the kitchen of any suburban house. From the window, a neat range of houses in soft blues, red and green could be pronounced along any gravel road.
But he entered the back porch, things change. The wind will be picked up. The turf is hard charged, rocky and immediate. The lawn of fighting grass seed suddenly falls to the edge of a narrow plateau. The ground then spills sharply into the valley of hundreds of feet below them before it rises to another island in the sky.
Decades ago, the cheap form of extraction called mountains with the removal of the mountain and coal mining equalized the mountains and pushed the detritus – sugar maples, newts, songs birds – down. While the federal law required these months to be leveled and planted, regenerated belt mines are no longer similar to the mountains. Instead of fresh Eastern forests, they look more like dry western plains.
In the area defined by steep slopes, however, these ecological cemeteries also provide a surprising solution to the problem that suffers from the inhabitants in the narrow valleys below: floods.
In 2022, apocalyptic floods swept through East Kentucky, killed 45 people, destroyed 542 houses and damaged thousands of others. Now instead of rebuilding in the floodplain, the state permanently lifts people to a safer country. Officials are almost $ 800 million for more than two years to recover these landscapes and convert them from desert into development.
“Climate change is real,” said Andy Beshear, Governor Kentucky, in an interview last month. “It is difficult to say which natural disaster would not or would not be without climate change because we had some big in the past.” However, we know that we see them more often and unfortunately we see many of the same places hit. ”