‘I’ve never seen water move so fast.’ Eastern KY residents recount harrowing moments

In a dire scene, several Kentuckians were trapped in houses Thursday morning and others said they clung desperately to trees to keep from being washed away by flash flooding.

Throughout eastern Kentucky, where at least eight people were reported dead as of early evening, residents were trapped by flash floods, some on the second floor or roofs of their homes.

At 12:30 p.m. Thursday, Gov. Andy Beshear said in a press conference people were still waiting to be rescued. Some were hanging to trees, and others were missing.

Beshear anticipated the number of deaths from flooding would be in the “double digits.”

In Perry County, Kayla Brown, 29, and Joe Salley Jr., 56, lived in a single-wide mobile home alongside a small stream that feeds into Grapevine Creek in the Grapevine community along Highway 28. They were listening to the rain Thursday morning and the water came up very quickly, too quickly for them to get out.

“Next thing you know, you were trapped,” said Salley. “It was like a wave coming at you out of the ocean.”

They shut themselves in a bedroom and closed the door to keep the water from coming in, putting the six dogs in the house on a mattress to try to keep them out of the water.

When the water receded a bit, Salley tried to clear a path through the debris. Then it started to rain heavily, and Brown was swept off her feet, she said.

The trailer was knocked off its foundation.

A neighbor, Jessie Terry, 41, had been helping get the couple’s dogs to safety and saw Brown fall.

“I knew when she went down she was in trouble,” Terry said.

Terry waded to Brown and helped her up, and two of them made their way to a small tree and clung to it.

“I knew that we’d be all right if we just hung on,” Terry said.

Terry found some sort of hose floating past in the debris and tied it around Brown and the tree. They held onto the tree while Brown held a miniature Doberman Pinscher named Brutus. He weighed just a few pounds, and she wouldn’t let him go.

“I was terrified. I thought for sure I was dead,” she said.

“She was screaming ‘Don’t let go of me,’ “ Terry said later in the day.

Terry said a large piece of metal roofing wrapped around the upstream side of the tree and helped deflect some of the water. He said he wasn’t sure they could have held on if the metal hadn’t blunted the force of the water.

Brown said they held on to the tree in the cold water for about two hours before rescuers could reach them. The responders threw them a rope and they used it to pull themselves through the water, Brown said.

Next door, Terry’s fiancee, Heather Davidson, stayed with her father, Isaac Eversole, as the water rose around his hospital bed. Ebersole is in hospice care and on oxygen, and Davidson said she wouldn’t leave him.

Water rose waist deep in the house and the refrigerator toppled over, but the water stopped before it covered Eversole’s bed and eventually an ambulance came and took him to the hospital.

“We was scared,” Davidson said.

Peter Youmans, the pastor at Davidson Baptist Church at Grapevine, was at home with his wife Hilda and their three grandchildren. The church and his house overlook the creek, and his wife could see water in the church parking lot about midnight. It just kept rising.

Water got about a foot deep in the house and 4 feet deep in the church. Youmans’ pick-up truck was pushed 30 or 40 yards.

“We kind of toughed it out. It was petrifying because of the kids,” said Youmans.

Youmans said the flood damaged the inside of the church and soaked Bibles and hymnals.

“We’ve got a long way to go,” he said.

While the current church was damaged, the original church next door, built in 1956, was destroyed. It was a pile of rubble on the bank of the creek Thursday.

In Whitesburg, rescuers were having difficulty getting to victims because of the strong currents, said Dee Davis, president of the Center for Rural Strategies.

“There are boats and jet skis out trying to help people,“ Davis noted.

Downtown Whitesburg was impassable with many roads covered with water.

“The water is crawling up Main Street. The first floor of Appalshop (an arts and education center) is covered with water,” Davis reported Thursday afternoon.

Teresa Caudill Collins, Davis’ assistant, said in Whitesburg, she and her husband cooked for people who were displaced.

“We were just trying to take care of our neighbors,” she said. “Everybody up here who didn’t get flooded has been trying to take care of everybody.”

Jordan Childers, a patrolman with the Hazard Police Department, lives near the woman who was killed in a rural area of Perry County.

Childers said his wife Ava was at home with their year-old son Wyatt and evacuated to a neighbor’s home on higher ground. The neighbor’s house was not damaged in the flood, but Childers’ house; another house next door that they owned and rented out; and three others were destroyed, he said.

Childers said the houses had been coal-camp houses at one point. He and his wife had just finished paying off the two houses two days before.

Thursday, Childers was trying to salvage some belongings from their home. The road to the community was blocked so he had to cross a hill on foot to reach the demolished house.

“Long as they are okay,” he said of his family, “material stuff you can replace.”

Nickole Brown was at the Hindman Settlement School teaching a poetry course at the Appalachian Writers’ Workshop when Troublesome Creek next to the historic school rose quickly.

She and others at the school moved to higher floors, then went to a dorm on the hill overlooking the school. One woman broke her ankle making the climb, Brown said.

The force of the water knocked the doors off the administration area of the school, she said, and damaged classrooms and apartments as well. They could smell gas as the flood flipped cars.

“It was just devastating,” Brown said. “I don’t know how they’re going to recover.”

In Breathitt County, Jerrica Turner, 24, of Lost Creek, was rescued when Riverside Christian School flooded.

“I’ve never seen water move so fast in my life,” she said.

One staff member was rescued from a roof at the school, and Turner said a boat rescued her and three others.

She said 15 others were still stranded as of Thursday.

Across the region, muddy, high water buckled roads, knocked down bridges, washed cars and trucks out of driveways and left debris from shattered buildings for miles along creeks and rivers.

“I’ve never seen a flood like this in my entire life,” Turner said.