Katie Myers, Author at West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Hector Saldivar Brings Mexican Folk Arts to East Tennessee

Inside Appalachia Folkways reporter Katie Myers travels to Lenoir City, Tennessee to speak with award-winning artist Hector Saldivar, and his apprentice Ariel, about bringing Mexican folk art to the hills of east Tennessee.

It took me a second to find Hector Saldivar’s Lenoir City artists’ studio, but after seeing it, it couldn’t have been any other building. Surrounded by fairly average mid century homes, Saldivar’s building is painted brightly in red, festooned in hanging tropical plants and wind chimes.

Inside, two life-size sculptures rest a table by the doorway. The interior is shady and lined with leafy, tropical plants. Hector and his niece Ariel work intently at a table, dipping strips of paper in papier-mâché by the light of a single lamp. Their extended family surrounds them, some watching, others playing phone games or texting. Snacks are out at another table to the side including tortilla chips and guacamole, food that is easy to eat while they work.

When Saldivar moved to east Tennessee from Mexico City, he didn’t think of himself as an artist. Today, his work in clay, papier mache, and tile shows at galleries all over the region. Over the years, he’s found a way to bring Mexican folk arts to Appalachia. Now, he teaches them, too.

One of the first sculptures he shows me is a little fantasy creature made of papier mache. It’s bright yellow and speckled with green, sort of like a lizard and a dinosaur. Each one is different. Some are cats, some are dogs. Many have wings. Some are blue, red or green. The creatures are called alebrijes.

“This something traditional from Oaxaca, Mexico,” Saldivar says. “They’re made with a special wood in Oaxaca.”

We don’t have that wood in the states, so Hector uses his own materials.

“My alebrijes are made with papier-mâché,” Saldivar says. “I started with wire and tape and later used paper mache, like I’m using right now.”

Hector showed me around his studio, pointing out sculptures on tables, on shelves, bursting out of every corner. As he did so, he told his life story.

“I was originally from Mexico City,” Saldivar says. “And I’ve been here in the United States while living in Knoxville for almost, maybe 35 years. And I’ve been doing art, like maybe 13 years, 14 years.”

But Saldivar always worked with his hands, even before he considered himself an artist. For years before his move, he was making piñatas for festivals in Mexico City.

“I always enjoyed making piñatas,” Saldivar said.

Saldivar was especially busy around Christmastime, during the festival of Las Posadas. It is a nine-day festival around Christmas which combines ancient indigenous practices with Catholic ones. All week people sing carols and break open star-shaped piñatas .

“You have to make one piñata each day,” Saldivar said. “They celebrate the Virgin Mary when she was pregnant. And she was knocking on the doors.”

During Las Posadas, revelers go from door to door, knocking and asking for sweets.

Saldivar’s family, too, had to go knocking on some doors.

Like many other immigrants, they were looking for the surest foothold in the economy they could find. In this case it was restaurant work. They opened a restaurant, the second in Lenoir city. It had to close a few years later, but they held onto the building.

“The building was empty, but I was working with paper mache downstairs,” Saldivar says. “And my sister said, you know, why not put your studio upstairs?”

Over the years, Saldivar met and learned from other artists who encouraged him to explore other mediums, like his clay, papier-mâché, and tile, using his past of piñata-making as inspiration.

In Mexico, papier mache is an old tradition, called cartoneria. It originated with indigenous crafts involving leaves and plant fibers. As indigenous peoples were forcibly converted to Catholicism, paper crafts persisted – often within the framework of Catholicism. That’s why piñatas are still popular around Christmastime. Cartoneria often mixes the sacred and the profane; past artists have made papier-mâché Judases, but also piñatas shaped like members of heavy metal band Judas Priest. The playful cartoneria spirit holds true for Saldivar.

Like Saldivar’s work, crafts were often made from found materials, like newspapers and cardboard. He had some mentors, but also did a lot of self-teaching.

“You know, when I see people doing something, I can try to do it too,” Saldivar says.

Back when Saldivar started, he had trouble getting community interest in his work. People were curious, but kind of confused.

“They said oh, it’s kinda scary, my skulls,” he admitted. “But people now, is getting more interested in Latin culture.”

Saldivar attributes the growing popularity of Mexican folk art to an unexpected source – the Disney movie “Coco.” It focused on the Day of the Dead. Skeletons in dresses are a fixture of Day of the Dead, a Mexican holiday in November that invokes a sense of familiarity and humor about death with visits to family graves, bright colors, and dancing. One such character is Catrina, one of the more bedazzled skull figures of Mexican folk art.

The studio is full of Catrinas in all shapes and sizes, from life-size to the size of a child’s doll. They all grin with an unmistakeable decorated death’s head, adorned in wide-brimmed black hats and well-bustled floor-length gowns.

Saldivar tells me the history of the Catrina. The character was first sketched by the artist Guadalupe Posada to make fun of Mexico City high society, and remind them that La Muerte (Death) would come for them too.

“That’s why she’s dressed, you know, very elegant,” Saldivar says.

Catrina became an iconic figure, and people began to dress like her, make figurines of her. Now, she’s a folk tradition.

We walk past a collection of other art projects.There are little clay Catrinas, a white sculpture with a silver crown, a skull with a spiky surgical mask, representing COVID-19, lay replicas of the Tree of Life, a traditional representation of the Garden of Eden, and Paintings of the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo.

Saldivar returns to the table, where his niece Ariel is working hard at a papier-mache sculpture. Hector’s been making one too. She’s learning from him. Saldivarr’s recently taken on Ariel as an apprentice, thanks to support from the Tennessee Arts Commission.

“Right now, I’m making a heart out of newspaper,” Ariel says, lifting up her work into the light. Behind her, her cousins play video games on their phones, and Saldivar’s sister quietly listens to the conversation.

“Recycled material, two hearts with wire around,” Saldivar adds, with a hint of a proud smile.

Ariel was born right in east Tennessee. She says the apprenticeship has helped her reconnect with her heritage.

“I think it’s more like introducing like the Mexican culture to here,” Ariel says, when asked what this work means to her. “To make Appalachians more diverse and knowledgeable about Mexican culture.”

Lenoir city has changed a lot since Saldivar’s family founded the town’s second Mexican restaurant, but there’s still plenty of work to do.

Saldivar’s work looks colorful and playful, but it has serious cultural connections. I ask him and Ariel if art with deep and resonant meaning might be taken too lightly by some of the gallery viewers who don’t have cultural context for the images. They both respond that that’s what they like best; seeing how its meaning changes in the eyes of the beholder.

“The main thing about doing artwork with my uncle is you can see, like, the different ways that art can be perceived,” Ariel says, not taking her eyes off her work. “Like how subjective it actually is, because my uncle creates different meanings for them, but other people can see them as one way.”

Ariel has presented her work at galleries with her uncle, and hopes to continue to do so in the future. Both want to see their work shown regionally, and Saldivar says he hopes to help create networks of support for other immigrant artists.

As I leave I stop by the ice cream store on the corner – they sell fruit popsicles, in the style of the Mexican state of Michoacan. The sound of children talking and laughing fills the air. The popsicles taste like home, not mine, but I can tell they taste like home to somebody.

The True(Ish) Story Of Tennessee Moonshiner Mahalia Mullins

Some say moonshiner Mahalia Collins Mullins once beat 30 men in a wrestling match and sold them all whisky afterward. Others say she was so large that when police tried to arrest her, they couldn’t get her through the door. By the time Mullins passed away, her story was known from coast to coast, and into Canada and Mexico. The headlines? “Not too Big for Death.” “Famous Moonshiner Dead, Defied Law Officers from a Mountain Top.”

In East Tennessee, legendary moonshiners like Popcorn Sutton loom large in the imagination, rebellious and wild, driving fast and shooting faster, and almost always white and male. But Mullins was different. As with many old stories, much of Mullins’s origins are shrouded in legend, and for every one story about her life, there are two more.

During her life, her public image was constructed by muckraking journalists and missionaries. One early interviewer, missionary C.H. Humble, decried her business as a “curse brought to her own door.” Another, journalist Paul Converse, made special note of what he saw as the feuding and lawlessness that surrounded her family. Even her name is debated – spelled a number of ways, and called in some sources Mary, Betsy or Haley, perhaps nicknames.

So what do we know for certain? Born in 1824 to a poor family, Mullins became something of a folk hero, a kind of Paul Bunyan figure for East Tennessee. She was a large woman, and lived on top of a mountain, such that the sheriff could never quite manage to bring her all the way down to court – a dynamic that created much of her legend. And she was Melungeon, a name given to families of Black, white, and indigenous descent who settled in parts of Central Appalachia beginning in the late 1700s, including the remote Vardy community, near the border of Tennessee and southwestern Virginia, where she grew up. Subject to discrimination, Melungeon communities and people were sensationalized by the press during Mahalia’s lifetime, laden with stereotypes attributed to both people of color and rural Appalachians. Many subsisted on what they could grow on their land. And in the beginning, so did Mahalia – but from there, the story of her life took a number of unusual turns that earned her both fame and scrutiny, behind which she, a real, complex woman, was sometimes hard to see.

Finding out who Mullins really was requires a drive to Hancock County, Tennessee, where her descendants tend to her cabin and tell visitors her story, as they see it.

The House That Moonshine Built
The Vardy Valley sits in a tangle of remote and winding mountain roads, the kind of place no one can get to by accident. There, Druanna Williams Overbay, a descendant of Mullins and a local public historian of sorts, keeps the lights on and allows visitors a peek into the Vardy community.

Overbay arrived at Mullins’s cabin on this particular instance to showcase her ancestor’s history. The cabin, she said, was moved several years ago from its old spot on Newman’s Ridge down into the valley. She can still point to the exact spot, up in a little dip on the ridge, abutting her own parents’ old property. The house, she said, was moved down from the ridge piece by piece and painstakingly reassembled and cleaned. “Up there in that little dip,” she said, looking towards the ridge behind the cabin, “was where Mahalia’s house sat.”

Overbay is also a descendant of Mullins. Unlike the newspapers, which some feel sought to sensationalize her, Overbay views her story as their heritage, and seeks to dispel myths about her life. “This is a very poor area,” says Overbay, “and there’s very few ways to earn and make a living.”

It’s often said that Mullins’s product was special, often flavored with apples from local orchards, and that prospective buyers came from miles around. That business put her head and shoulders above other moonshiners as something of a boutique seller, and it funded the house that is still open to the public today.

Druanna Williams Overbay, a descendent of Mullins, offers visitors a tour of the cabin.

It’s a large house, even now. Two floors, a wide porch, and two separate rooms at the bottom. Overbay said it was built after Mullins’s first, more modest cabin was burned to the ground by Confederate soldiers as a consequence for her support of the Union army.
First, Overbay showed the keeping room, which functioned as a dining area.

Artifacts of her life – from the china, to a simple spinning wheel, to a chamber pot once given to her daughter as a joke – surrounded the space, making it cozy, domestic, and warm. “She loved blue flow china,” said Overbay, referring to a special kind of china from England, displayed in a glass case. “So when they left home, her grandchildren would send pieces of blue flow china to her.”

Overbay then led the way upstairs – a narrow stairway. Upstairs was for the kids, of which Mullins had somewhere between 13 and 20, but likely 15, depending on who is asked. It was here they slept, and also went to school, since there was no school in the Vardy Valley until 1899. Even if there had been, at that time, free people of color were prohibited from attending public school, and as Melungeons, that would have been a reality for Mullins’s entire family.

Mullins may have identified particularly with the Cherokee people, said Overbay, who believes Mullins’s father, Solomon, may have applied to the U.S. government for recognition as a member of the tribe. That would have given the family access to some reparations money for the loss of ancestral land. While there is no online record of Solomon’s application, one exists for her son, Reuben. After years of angry back-and-forth with the government, Reuben’s application was denied. Druanna thinks this history may be why Mullins chose not to pay taxes on her liquor.

“They ain’t getting a damn dime of my money,” Overbay imagined her saying. “They owe me, and I’m not paying them.”

Downstairs, in Mullins’ bedroom, was a simple room with a four-poster bed and mantle, where she spent much of her later life. Here, she reportedly made and sold her moonshine, and, finally, passed away. By the end of her life, her health had declined steeply. Though many people made her size into a joke, she was severely disabled with a skin disease called elephantiasis. One source noted that she almost wished the sheriff would take her to court, just so she could see a little more of the world. She had outlived her husband, and three of her children, who died violently, one in a brawl, one lynched, and one in the Civil War. It’s said she had them buried right outside her bedroom window where she could see them, once she could no longer leave her bed.

A mantle in Mullins’s bedroom displays press and popular photographs.

It was 1898 when Mullins passed away. She was buried outside her cabin on Newman’s Ridge, with her family. As with her life, there were multiple stories about her death.

“Some say that they built her a coffin around the bed,” Overbay said. “Took her out the back and buried her in the backyard. Others said she was rolled up in a quilt and pushed out the door to her grave.”

After a moment, Overbay laughed knowingly. “We add to our stories as years pass, as you know,” she said.

Even in death, to look at Mullins was to see double. Many papers published a photo alongside her obituary that showed her, looking sickly, in bed and wearing a nightgown, clearly suffering from her disease. But her family was careful to save other photographs – portraits of her in beautiful dresses, arrayed with her family, posing with poise and grace. In these portraits, she appeared, perhaps, as she might have wanted to be seen.

Setting The Record Straight
“People in Hancock County would prefer to look at her in kind of a respectful way, and not kind of a sensationalist circus freak, how she’s been portrayed,” says Wayne Winkler.

Winkler is the author of a Melungeon histories Walking Towards the Sunset and Beyond the Sunset: The Melungeon Outdoor Drama, 1969-1979. Winkler identifies as Melungeon himself, and spent many childhood summers with family near Vardy. He hopes that Mahalia, like many other maligned Appalachian women, can come to be seen as a full person, contextualized in her time and place, rather than as a joke.

Winkler notes that at the time, moonshining was common in Hancock County – and throughout the mountains – as a way for local people to squeeze extra money out of their corn crop. In a way, it was just another value-added product. People used it to let loose, but they also used it as a medicine, cleaning agent, and preservative. While it may have seemed lawless to outsiders, to locals, it was not unusual. In fact, Mullins was generous with her good fortune, says Winkler, and was loved for it.

“When children went over there she always had some cookies and milk for them,” said Winkler. “They always wanted to go visit Aunt Haley.”

The stories are fun – whether or not they’re true – but sometimes their telling leads to misconceptions. “People in Vardy are amused by them,” Winkler says, “but there’s a respect with which they feel, that sometimes outsiders don’t have that same respect.”

Mullins’s descendants spread far and wide, and donate their money, time, and heirlooms to the Vardy Community Historical Society, keeping her memory, and the memories of their other ancestors, alive. Her story may sound like a folk tale, but to the Vardy community, she’s family history.

This interview is part of an episode of “Inside Appalachia,” featuring stories about Matriarchal Moonshiners, Legendary Lawbreakers and more.

New Research: Thousands of Jobs Possible in Reclamation of Abandoned Wells, Mines

In Central Appalachia an estimated 538,000 unplugged oil and gas wells and 853,393 acres of abandoned mine lands sit unreclaimed, often polluting the air and water, and presenting public safety threats.

But according to two new reports from the regional think tank Ohio River Valley Institute, these sites that now pose serious health risks to residents could be providing thousands of jobs for the region. The group’s findings indicate that, should the federal government take the risk seriously and invest in mitigation, not only would environmental risk be reduced, but thousands of well-paying jobs could potentially be created.

Plugging Abandoned Wells

In the first report, Repairing the Damage from Hazardous Oil and Gas Wells, senior researcher Ted Boettner found that abandoned oil and gas wells pose a significant threat to humans through air and water pollution.

Boettner found that the cost of plugging abandoned oil and gas wells may be more than states could afford, and urged federal investment in cleanup efforts. He said a large scale federal program could prevent the emissions equivalent of two million tons of coal per year. This could be paid for by eliminating $11 billion in federal oil and gas subsidies, or imposing a small fee per unit, similar to that levied on coal through the federal Abandoned Mine Lands program. Such action could potentially spur large-scale job creation.

“Over 20 years,” Boettner said, “you could create over 15,000 jobs each year.”

Mine Cleanup

In the second report, Repairing the Damage, research fellow Eric Dixon estimated that repairing abandoned mine sites could cost as much as $24.4 billion. As sites continue to erode and deteriorate, he said, that cost could rise to as much as $33 billion. Over 5500 miles of streams, Dixon estimates, have been clogged by sediment and runoff, dramatically altering the hydrology of the landscape.

“There’s also a lot of poor vegetation on these sites that isn’t sequestering the carbon that it could be, if we had reforested these sites,” Dixon said.

Reforestation is a major recommendation in the report, which suggests that programs such as the Biden Administration’s proposed Civilian Climate Corps could put thousands of workers in ecologically sustainable jobs doing just that. Potentially, this could teach workers valuable skills. Dixon believes that widespread employment on old mine sites would be most effective when coupled with a living wage, good benefits, and widespread unionization in the workforce.

“To address climate change and tackle our region’s persistent inequality head-on,” he said, “Congress should consider creating a public reclamation jobs program within a Civilian Climate Corps, to make sure reclamation jobs are accessible to those most in need.”

Economic Engine

Between mines and wells, the institute identified 30,000 potential new jobs in Appalachia.

This research comes on the heels of the Biden Administration’s American Jobs Plan, which promises job creation in the United States through rebuilding and repairing vital infrastructure.

The research was co-presented by Reimagine Appalachia, a coalition of Appalachian organizations which previously developed a blueprint for a 21st century New Deal, a plan for rebuilding the middle class through diverse, union jobs in clean energy and environmental restoration.

Slip Sliding Away: Landslides Follow Flooding As Major Risk To Appalachian Communities

Elaine Tanner lives with her life partner, Jimmy Hall, at the head of Mill Creek in Letcher County, Kentucky. Jimmy is a sixth-generation Letcher Countian, and the land is his family land. Together, they like to roll around on their property on their ATV. But lately, Tanner’s spent more time searching for signs of damage than having fun. That’s what she was doing on Thursday morning — investigating her mountain.

“A few days ago,” she said, “the rains came and the mountain busted open.”

After the March 28 rainstorm, Tanner was dismayed to find the hillside looking even less stable than usual. Boulders had shifted downslope. Trees were leaning, she said, almost like they were drunk. Even though the head of the hollow is too high to flood, Tanner, like many who live on higher ground, found herself facing another problem: landslides.

In 2020, parts of the coal surface mine above their residence blew out — an event when flooding causes water pressure to overcome a mine barrier, forcing earth, water and rock down a mountain. Though no one was hurt, Tanner believes the worst may be yet to come. “When the ponds fill up and saturate that bench,” she said, pointing to the crest of the hill, “the bench is gonna drop.”

The bench is the narrow ledge cut into the mountainside, which a mining company uses to access the mine. Mudflows from its churned-up surface have gummed up the creek, turning it a color Tanner likens to a “dirty milkshake.” The ponds work to control runoff, and fill with water when it rains.

Slow-moving slip above Elaine Tanner’s house in Dean, KY.

This is just the latest in what Tanner says is a years-long litany of land stability problems that she alleges go back to a coal company called Deane Mining. Now a subsidiary of Quest Energy, the company acquired a permit above Tanner’s house originally belonging to the CONSOL coal company. Ever since, parts of the mountain have been slipping, she said, some quickly and some slowly. (The company did not respond to a request for comment by the time of deadline for this story.)

Parts of the hillside have already fallen, luckily far from Tanner’s house. But when she closes her eyes, she imagines she can hear the trees creaking their way towards her house.

Blowout on Mill Creek above Elaine Tanner’s house.

“I have many restless nights here,” she said. “There’s no predicting what this will do.”

Tanner’s worry may be warranted. Climate change has been shown to increase the frequency and intensity of rainfall throughout the Ohio Valley, and major flooding events have now disrupted eastern Kentucky communities twice in the span of a month. In each case, the immediate aftermath involved cleanup from not only extensive water damage, but fallen rocks and dirt. While insurance, or federal disaster assistance, may cover the cost of damage to a flooded home, victims of landslides often have no such recourse, leaving them limited options.

Clear and Present Risk

“East Kentucky is a naturally landslide susceptible part of the world,” Matthew Crawford said.

Crawford, who works for the Kentucky Geological Survey, says landslides can take many forms and many names: Mudflows, rockslides, slips, creeps. Each one takes on a different character depending on where it happens, and what it hits. In fact, rockfalls and landslides cost the state $4 million annually, and that’s with a large number going unreported. Eastern Kentucky leads the state in landslides. In eastern Kentucky, nearly everyone is vulnerable, because in much of the area, there’s nowhere to build but the floodplain and the mountainside.

This map compiled by the Kentucky Geological Survey shows landslide sites in red.

Heavy rains add to the risk, Crawford said. He recently completed a study of landslide risk in five counties in eastern Kentucky, which he hopes will help local officials prepare for the worst. Currently, he says, there just isn’t enough data, especially when it comes to correlating rainfall with landslide risk. Because of that, the problem hits hardest at home — because very few insurance companies will cover damage that is both rare and catastrophic.

“When you have that, I guess it’s hard for insurance actuaries to come up with risk maps,” he said.

There are a few options for landowners, and all of them take time, energy, and the willingness to navigate bureaucracy.

If a mining causes a landslide, and the mine is old enough to be covered by the 1977 Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act, it’s possible to ask the state’s Division of Abandoned Mine Lands to inspect the property. If the mine is determined as the cause of the incident, AML will do what they can to reduce the problem, and a property owner may try to sue to recover damages or force repairs.

For other incidents, there’s often only one other option, called a Hazard Mitigation Grant. Complex and time-consuming, this route requires coordination between local officials and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as well as voluntary participation from impacted residents. The process can take years.

One community in the town of Evarts, deep in Harlan County, Kentucky, has been going through the process since a 2015 snowstorm caused a mountainside to collapse onto a cluster of homes. The residents were all renters, and after trying, unsuccessfully, to contact their landlord, Harlan County opted to go the federal route. The grant will pay residents to move, but does not help them find housing. According to Harlan County Emergency Management Director David McGill, the county is required to claim the land as permanent green space, which means those homes can never be occupied again. “The individuals will be moving out of that area,” McGill said.

Man-Made Problem?

McGill noted that landslides are a constant risk in steep and rugged Harlan County. In late March, flooding in the area caused the usual levels of headache for residents and local officials. In one case, debris rolled off an unreclaimed mine in Harlan County, formerly owned by the Blackjewel coal company, blocking a road and causing locals to lose drinking water access.

In 2019, Blackjewel filed for bankruptcy, and this year a federal judge approved the bankruptcy, leaving over two hundred permits up for sale and many parcels of land unreclaimed. However, when asked if unreclaimed mine lands were a larger problem, McGill demurred.

Dustin White, a community organizer with the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, argues that mining often contributes to landslides. “It really changes the topography of the land,” White said.

Strip mines and deep mines alike change the flow of water across the land, creating disorder in headwaters that can, given the chance, build into chaos downstream. Stripped trees and bare soil increase rain runoff, which clogs creeks with sediment. And abandoned mines, he said, are rarely watched closely.

White noted that the ecosystem has been damaged by more than just the coal industry. Gas pipeline construction, deforestation, road construction, and other forms of poorly planned land use have transformed the landscape.

When asked what many people in Central Appalachia tend to do in the event of a devastating landslide, White grew quiet for a moment, then said, “They just walk away from the place.”

Hoping to Stay

For the Mill Creek hollow, it’s a waiting game. Maybe the mud will stay above their houses; Maybe one year, when it rains, it won’t. Unless something is done, they fear, their luck might not always hold. And when it happens, who will they call?

Tanner and her partner don’t want to walk away. They have lots of dreams for their land. They have long wanted to open it to visitors as a camping or hunting ground, maybe build themselves a cabin somewhere a little up the ridge. But first, said Tanner, they need to know it is safe. She has been organizing and filing complaints against Deane Mining for many years, hoping to at least gain some measure of safety, make them pay for some native trees on the bare mountain top to hold the water in.

Elaine Tanner points out the mining permit above her house.

“This is where I want to be,” she said as she made her way back down the ridge.

She paused for a moment and looked across the narrow hollow, where her partner’s family cemetery sits nestled in a grove of pines.

“That’s where I’ll go, you know,” she noted, smiling a little. “I’d like to go there knowing I’m not going to be covered up with big rocks and mud.”

The Ohio Valley ReSource gets support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and our partner stations.

Blackjewel Bankruptcy Leaves Damaged Lands, Miners’ Compensation In Limbo

The Blackjewel bankruptcy case has been ongoing since the summer of 2019 when Blackjewel, LLC abruptly collapsed, leaving over 2000 miners in Wyoming, Kentucky and West Virginia without their jobs, their benefits, or their final paychecks. In protest, Kentucky miners spent much of that summer camped on the railroad tracks to the mine, blocking the company’s last load of coal from the market.

Once an economic behemoth, Blackjewel filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. On Friday, March 19, Judge Benjamin A. Kahn approved the bankruptcy plan.

This plan will allow Blackjewel to sell its mining permits to other companies. Environmentalists have expressed concern that this would allow Blackjewel to abandon the permits it is unable to sell, leaving old, damaged mine lands unrepaired. Advocacy groups including Appalachian Citizens Law Center, Sierra Club, and Kentuckians for the Commonwealth have all taken an interest in this case.

Appalachian Voices Central Appalachian Senior Program Manager Erin Savage said the case concerns them because of the volume of permits that will now be on the market.The permits — more than 200 total, and more than 30 of them in Kentucky — will now be on the market for a six-month period, in hopes other coal companies will purchase them. Savage says she fears that the coal industry’s economic decline may mean permits go unclaimed, leaving the reclamation of abandoned mine lands an open question.

“I think we’re delaying a lot of inevitable bond forfeitures,” said Savage. If that happens, she added, finding sufficient will and money to properly reclaim these sites will become difficult, leaving community members living near those sites vulnerable to erosion, water pollution, and slope instability as the old mines continue to deteriorate.

Meanwhile, Blackjewel’s former miners are still waiting for full compensation following a settlement with the company in a class action lawsuit based on a violation of the WARN Act. That law requires 60 days of notice before a mass layoff. This settlement grants workers the equivalent of 44 additional days of pay, on top of what they were initially owed by the company. However, it is unclear where their compensation will come from. Ned Pillersdorf, an attorney participating in the case, said the company’s former executive, Jeff Hoops, took advantage of the system, leaving miners and permits in limbo.

“We never thought this was a legitimate bankruptcy,” Pillersdorf said. “We always thought that Hoops diverted money from Blackjewel and declared bankruptcy to shed debt.”

Judge Kahn is expected to sign the final order this week, after which the ruling will go into effect.

Slow Recovery: Repeated Floods And Storms Strain East Kentucky’s Aging Infrastructure

Katrina Bostrin had never seen the lake come up that quickly before. She’d lived in Jackson, the county seat of Breathitt County, Kentucky, on and off since she was a child. It had come up to the garage before, but never inside her home.

As she spoke, a volunteer crew from a local church ripped out a ruined floor. They had just finished with the living room, where Katrina stood on the bare wooden subfloor. “This was where we celebrated Christmas every year,” she said, as afternoon light streamed in through the window.

During the flood that started on the final weekend of February, 2021, the water was six to eight inches deep indoors. Katrina and her two sons waded to her aunt’s house, but their trials weren’t over. “The next day,” she said, “that was when they came through, saying we had to evacuate immediately.”

Residents rebuild after flooding near the Highway 15 dam at Panbowl Lake spurred evacuations.

Katrina was evacuated from her home near Panbowl lake, along with about a thousand residents, including a nursing home which, she says, is likely to close down. Local emergency management officials feared the dam would breach. In the end, it did not, but as the lake receded, residents like Katrina faced the prospect of a long cleanup.

In a region where highways, dams, water systems and other infrastructure necessities are aging, repeated severe weather events have added to the strain, forcing communities to spend their resources fixing new problems rather than on improved resilience and upgrades.

Post-flood cleanup underway at Katrina Bostrin’s home near Panbowl Lake.

Aging Infrastructure

It’s not just residential homes that need rebuilding — highways, county roads, power lines, and water mains will likely require millions of dollars in repairs.

Breathitt County, along with many others, faced record flooding in the last weekend of February, prompting Gov. Andy Beshear to declare a state of emergency. More than 7 inches of rain fell in some areas. Officials and aid organizations say that while the initial event is over, rebuilding could take months. The rain not only damaged structures, but triggered landslides, felled trees, and overwhelmed water systems. In many counties, water main breaks spurred shutoffs and boil water notices.

To make matters worse, major structures are beginning to show signs of age. Panbowl Lake, a seven-mile-long oxbow lake, is dammed by a section of Highway 15 that dates back to 1963.

Though many feared on March 2 that the dam was destabilizing, H.B. Elkins, spokesman for District 10 of the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, said he had no fear the dam might fail. His biggest worry was that the river would rise higher than the road, pouring back into the lake. Elkins was particularly worried about potential closures on Highway 15, a major commercial artery and the shortest road to Lexington. Luckily, these outcomes were avoided. Engineers are now working to stabilize the embankment, but Elkins said the fix is temporary.

Downtown Beattyville days after the March 2021 flood.

In Beattyville, a small city in Lee County, which borders Breathitt to the west, the Kentucky River rose quickly on March 1, destroying homes and businesses. Four to six feet of water entered most businesses on Main Street. A few days after water receded, dried mud still caked the street as furniture and carpets were tossed into dumpsters and truck trailers.

Los Two Brothers Mexican restaurant began repairing floors and replacing walls soon after water drained to the creek below the building. Restaurant manager Alexis Townsend said she does worry that the restaurant could flood again but hopes that it doesn’t.

Los Two Brothers Mexican restaurant in Beattyville after the March 2021 flood.

“Because I really like my location, and I like my community, and I don’t want to leave this restaurant,” Townsend said. She said some businesses won’t reopen on Main Street and plan to relocate on a new road on higher ground.

Beattyville Mayor Scott Jackson said the flood led to a boil water advisory but they were issued a few days before the flood.

“But we’ve had leaks that put us on a boil water advisory a little earlier than that,” Jackson said. He noted that flooding limited the city’s capacity to test their water. Because drinking water is piped from the river, work can’t be done until the river goes down.

Echoes of 2020

This is the second major flooding disaster in two years for East Kentucky. While 2020’s flooding concentrated in another watershed — the Cumberland River, in far southeast Kentucky — some community members are unlucky enough to have been hit twice. Perry County, next to Breathitt, experienced flooding in both years.

Mandi Sheffel had opened the Read Spotted Newt, her independent bookstore, only seven days prior to the February 2020 flooding event. That morning, she remembers, she watched the river slowly rise, and knew she had to pack away all of her merchandise. As she did so, the water rose and rose, eventually to two feet, causing damage that would take months to repair. “It was devastating,” Sheffel said.

Mandi Sheffel at the Read Spotted Newt’s second location.

She sat in her new location, up a hill by a busy intersection on Memorial Drive. Her store is high and dry. One might think she would now escape the worst of the flooding, but almost exactly one year after water reached her store, the high water found her again — this time, in neighboring Breathitt County, where she lives. The creek rose high enough in her holler that she was trapped there for three days.

As she sat at a small table by the window of her bookstore, she said she thought disasters were coming more often than they once did. After the 2020 floods, people reassured her that she wouldn’t see its (it like this?) like for a long time.

“I had people say, it’s been fifteen years since this happened,” she said. “And here we are again, almost exactly a year later.”

In a recent analysis of flooding risk data, the Ohio Valley ReSource found roughly 5% of Kentucky homes are at increased risk of damage, largely due to more frequent heavy downpours in a warming climate.

But in east Kentucky the risk is far higher. In Breathitt County, where Katrina Bostrin and Mandi Sheffel live, 56% of homes are at risk of flooding, according to the analysis. In Perry County, home to Sheffel’s bookstore, 42% of homes are at risk. The areas with some of the highest risk are also among Kentucky’s — and the country’s — poorest counties.

While Sheffel notes Hazard did not fare as badly this year as other towns nearby, the city still faces severe environmental challenges. The newest tenants in Sheffel’s old building downtown are currently handling water damage, just as she did a year ago. Municipalities are finding that even with increased investment in resilient infrastructure, repeated flooding interrupts even best-laid plans.

Hazard’s city officials recently invested $9 million in infrastructure, which the city is directing toward water system improvements. But Downtown Coordinator Bailey Richards said repeated natural disasters continue to divert attention from preventative measures. Richards is hopeful that businesses will continue to open downtown, but the water seems to creep up to the same section of Main Street every year.

“It’s degrading the system faster than it normally would,” Richards said. “It’s getting harder and harder to catch up.”

Dual Disaster Declarations?

Perry County Emergency Management officials have come to expect a busy February, but it’s difficult for responders to predict which communities will be hardest hit. While some areas of the county hit hard in 2020 were spared this year, others have seen record flooding, which followed right on the heels of a historic ice storm. Perry County Emergency Management Director Jerry Stacy still had crews out removing downed trees and repairing roadways when the flood undid their progress.

Though many hope this event is an anomaly, trends say otherwise. In eight of the last 10 years in Kentucky, floods, landslides, tornadoes and severe winter weather events have resulted in disaster declarations by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Experts say climate change has made east Kentucky increasingly vulnerable to increased flooding and landslides. In 2016, the Environmental Protection Agency released a report on the subject, detailing a 27% increase in heavy rainfall events across the Southeast since 1958. Sixty inches of rain fell in 2020 alone, a significant departure from the historical average. And east Kentucky often sees high rainfall well into the spring — in 2020, FEMA responded to widespread flooding a second time, in later March.

Multiple counties are now preparing damage assessments, and the state submitted applications to FEMA for a federal disaster declaration for both the flooding and the ice storm that preceded it.

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear meeting with eastern Kentucky officials in Beattyville on March 5, 2021

Governor Andy Beshear said help is on the way through the COVID-19 relief legislation recently signed by President Joe Biden, which will make money available for infrastructure improvements in towns and counties.

“A lot of them have water and sewer projects that need to be done,” Beshear said of the flood-impacted areas. “And we’d have a chance, if we spend this right, to help those areas be more resilient to these types of flash floods or other disasters in the future.”

The funding will focus on repairs for the eight most heavily-impacted counties: Estill, Lee, Owsley, Breathitt, Powell, Jackson, Clay and Johnson. Local officials hope public assistance will arrive soon, but they will likely not receive word on FEMA’s decision until April.

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