probablyasocialecologist:

At one point in recent history, more than one fourth of Knott County was owned by major coal companies. People were forced to work sixteen-hour days in the mines, their communities’ already-fragile infrastructure was worn down by prolonged resource extraction, their lives and housing and job options were reduced to Victorian-era levels of proletarian scarcity, and not even Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty was going to turn that around. Go to Neon, Knott County, Breathitt County, today, and witness the class war. Even before the flood, it looked like what they call natural disaster, all the time, every day.

The poor and working people of this part of Kentucky also live in social environments that are heavily policed. Many are addicted to substances that were forced upon them by pharmaceutical companies at a moment of extreme regional crisis—the organized abandonment of the coal industry. You saw how this aggressive policing played out in the hours after the flood. While everyday people braved the storm to help out their neighbors—I heard a story about one Whitesburg City Hall worker named Red, who never learned to swim but managed to rescue twelve people from their homes using an old kayak he found—the cops were already practically salivating to shoot looters. The Letcher County sheriff said he was going to “limit these dirtbags” and “make a damn example of them.” Never mind the fact that many of the area’s roads were still inaccessible at this point, leading one to the logical conclusion that he could only be referring to flood pirates.

Meanwhile, the people I’ve seen and talked with have been in no condition for looting, either physically or mentally. Everyone, rich and poor alike, is wearing that vacant face you see boxers get after taking a hard one to the jaw. This didn’t stop the sheriff and Whitesburg city police from bringing in a humvee and cruisers from at least six different regional municipalities, enforcing a curfew from midnight to 6 a.m., and towing out flooded cars from downtown without notifying the owners, then making them pay an impoundment fee. The cops’ actions infused a situation already rife with fear and paranoia with even more fear and paranoia, when what people really needed was safety and freedom of movement. This immediate rush toward a law-and-order crackdown is probably as good a harbinger of the new climate-crisis paradigm than any other thing I’ve witnessed.

But you don’t have to look hard for other examples. Every government institution, from top to bottom, has seemed content to sacrifice poor and working people one by one. As soon as the flood hit, Eastern Kentucky’s communications infrastructure buckled under duress, leaving people isolated and alone for hours. More than twenty-three thousand lost electricity. Roads and bridges have collapsed, leaving entire communities inaccessible. Others, like Neon, are without running water and waste disposal, and it may be months before this can be fixed. While President Joe Biden declared the flood a major disaster on July 29, it was another two days before the state’s first FEMA mobile registration center opened to help residents access relief; additional centers did not reach Knott, Breathitt, and other counties until August 2. You can easily talk yourself out of criticizing this delay until you concede that, yes, OK, we do live in the wealthiest, most technologically advanced society in human history, so surely something else must be going on here.