Estimated costs for renovating or rebuilding the 540 destroyed and 4,500 severely damaged homes from last July’s Kentucky floods could reach $1 Billion, say researchers from the  Ohio River Valley Institute and the Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center.
The report cites a terrifying gap in funding, with only $159 million has been raised so far by federal, state, and philanthropic sources to support local residents, which was a sum found in a separate study by the group.
Decades of land degredation and inadequate remediation, if any at all, has left the landscape, along with the homes and residents on it, vulnerable to disasters like this one, in which at least 40 people lost their lives.
The researchers are using this data to push for aid proposals to work on filling that funding gap. These aid proposals include home replacement, and in some cases, relocation to less flood-prone areas. Home repairs for damage are also included in the aid proposals.
