“This is an ongoing natural disaster, with more rain expected tonight that could worsen the situation. The death toll has heartbreakingly risen to 8 Kentuckians lost,” Gov. Andy Beshear tweeted.
Beshear said personnel from the National Guard, the Fish & Wildlife Department, state police and local emergency management agencies were responding to the crisis.
Additional rainfall amounts of over an inch are expected through Friday evening. “We’re watching pretty close and it’s not going to take too much to cause some additional flooding issues,” Dustin Jordan, of the weather service office in Jackson, told CNN.
The rains have caused untold damage to homes in the state’s slice of central Appalachia and forced some residents to the roofs of their swamped homes to await rescue, the governor said at an afternoon news conference.
Eastern Kentucky resident Belinda Asher said she received a flash flood alert on her phone at 1:15 a.m.
“By 2 a.m., everything I had was completely underwater,” she told CNN, adding 10 to 15 other families in a 1-mile stretch also lost everything.
Asher, her husband and three children live on the line dividing Breathitt and Perry counties. Their three-bedroom home and her truck were washed away early Thursday. The family is now staying with her brother-in-law in Hazard.
“I have no plan, I don’t know, how do you start from zero?” she asked.
The governor said the state will need a long time to recover.
“Hundreds will lose their homes, and this is going to be yet another event (where) it’s going to take not months, but likely years, for many families to rebuild and recover,” Beshear said at a morning media briefing.
Earlier Thursday, the governor activated the National Guard to help with rescues and recovery and declared an emergency to expedite resources to help, he said.
The Guard has identified people stuck on roofs and was “making preparations to go in and withdraw them,” the state’s adjutant general, Maj. Gen. Hal Lamberton, said at morning news conference, without detailing where these people were.
Video from various locations showed floodwater covering roads and swallowing portions of homes and vehicles.
Barbara Wicker was worried about relatives in Hindman, including five grandchildren, because water had surrounded their homes, she told Clement in a predawn interview.
“I can’t reach them. I can’t reach 911. … There’s no help in sight,” Wicker told Clement outdoors in Hindman, a Knott County town roughly a 130-mile drive southeast of Lexington.
In Elkhorn City, Glenda Looney and her husband sat on their porch after moving stuff to the second floor and praying for the water to go down.
The water was a foot deep in the laundry room and the floors in most of the rooms in the house were soaked.
“We are just so thankful that all we have here is cleaning” and ripping up carpets, Looney told CNN. “We feel bad for the people who have lost so much.”
The weather is expected to improve over the weekend. “We should see dry weather start to move back into the area as we move into Saturday for most locations,” the weather service’s Jordan said.
Deaths in at least two counties
Of the people who died as a result of the flooding, at least one died in Perry County, and one in Knott County, Beshear said at the second news conference.
Another was an 81-year-old woman who was a native of Perry County, the governor said, without saying where she died.
The Perry County coroner’s office said it knew of at least one death there Thursday morning — that of an 82-year-old woman whose body was found in Coneva after she was reported missing.
Authorities had to travel half a mile by boat, and walk about a mile by foot, to reach her, said Jeffrey Combs, Perry County’s chief deputy coroner.
Many of the roadways in the county are inaccessible, said Combs, who did not release the woman’s name.
Perry County Judge Scott Alexander told CNN at least 75% of the county has significant damage to roads and bridges and that several homes have been damaged.
A 76-year-old man and a woman in her late 60s/early 70s died in Clay County after being swept from their homes near the town of Manchester, officials with the coroner’s office said.
It was not immediately clear whether the victims were part of the eight deaths announced by Beshear.
There is no precise number of people missing. The governor said, “There are a number of people that are unaccounted for and I’m nearly certain this is a situation where we are going to lose some of them.”
Residents from Breathitt, Knott, Leslie, Letcher, Owsley, Pike, Perry and Wolfe counties who have family members who are unaccounted for have been asked by Kentucky State Police to have their missing family member’s first and last name, phone number, addresses and descriptions when they reach out to state authorities.
In Floyd County, about 80 people have been rescued, according to Judge/Executive Robbie Williams. He added that most of those were in the western part of the county where it rained 6 to 7 inches in a four-hour period.
“I’ve never seen this much water before,” Williams said. “I mean it just absolutely poured and we’ve got, you know, some small towns that are completely underwater.”
He said he has not heard of any deaths or that anyone is missing.
Region suffers outages of power and water service
The National Guard was deploying helicopters and trucks that can move through water to deliver supplies and transport people, and Beshear also declared an emergency to help unlock other resources, he said at a news conference. Fish and wildlife workers were “out with boats, working to make water rescues where safe for their personnel,” he said.
Of the rescue crews in the field now, he said: “They are fighting so hard to reach people, but this is so widespread.”
“We have more helicopters on the way thanks to West Virginia and Tennessee National Guard,” Beshear said.
Rescue areas included a school in Breathitt County, where a couple of staff members were stranded in an otherwise empty building, Beshear said. The Guard was preparing to rescue them, Lamberton said Thursday morning.
Water service also was interrupted in parts of eastern Kentucky Thursday, in part because pipes burst in flooding events and systems need to be shut down for repairs, Beshear said. Truckloads of water were being sent to the region, he said.
Three state parks will be available to shelter people who lost their homes, Beshear said.
‘Please stay off the roads’
In the Breathitt County community of Jackson, floodwater swiftly ran past a home in Thursday’s predawn darkness, carrying a trash can and other debris with it, video recorded by Deric Lostutter showed.
“Many roadways in the county are becoming covered with water and are impassable. Please stay off the roads if at all possible tonight,” the post said.
Swollen rivers and creeks in the region spilled over the land.
The gauge there was reading 20.91 feet at 10 a.m. Thursday; the previous record was 14.7 feet, set on January 29, 1957. The data is preliminary and will need to be reviewed, because items can become stuck to the gauge and give false readings during major flooding.
‘Seemingly never-ending fire hose’ of moisture across much of US
West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice declared a state of emergency for Fayette, Greenbrier, Logan, McDowell, Mingo and Wyoming counties due to significant flooding, according to a news release.
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin declared a state of emergency due to the flooding in the southwestern part of his state.
CNN’s Dave Hennen, Payton Major, Claudia Dominguez, Amanda Musa, Sara Smart, Chris Boyette, Monica Garrett and Judson Jones contributed to this report