"Flooded...Yet Knott Alone" by Miriam Moyer.

With the massive flooding and steadily rising death toll from the flood in Texas on July 4, 2025, I am certain that quite a few people might be interested in this book by Miriam Moyer, a Mennonie woman and writer who lives in Knott County. The book contains nearly fifty short chapters, which Moyer describes in the subtitle as "short stories of what Knott County people experienced in the July 28, 2022, flood." In spite of the large number of what I have called "chapters" and Moyer calls "short stories", the book is only 303 pages and is a fairly fast read if you don't allow yourself to be overcome by the constantly repititous stories of near death and survival by only a hairsbreadth. I met Moyer and bought the book in October 2024 at the Alice Lloyd College Appalachia Day where she was selling the book. Although I have numerous friends in the conservative Mennonite congregations in Knott, Johnson, and Morgan counties in Eastern Kentucky, I had never met Miriam Moyer until that day at Alice Lloyd. As a native of Knott County, I was interested in reading about the floods even though I had no direct contacts among the hundreds of victims who survived or the 19 dead from the flood. I always have a large "To Be Read" shelf of books and it is pure coincidence that I had started the book in time to complete it during the week of the Texas flood. The book is based on recorded interviews with numerous victims of the flood, local officials, recovery workers, and others in the county. I firmly believe that if Mirian Moyer still owns the recordings of those interviews they deserve to be placed in a legitimate historical library setting such as the Special Collections Department at Berea College in Berea, Kentucky. Those interviews will be of significant interest to writers, researchers, and family members of victims for the entire foreseeable future. But I was disppointed to see that Moyer did not use a lot of direct quotations from the interviews in the book. Instead, she used very minimal direct quotes and paraphrased parts of what I assume were the recordings to compose the individual chapters. The book also has a strongly religious focus as does all writing I have ever read from members of conservative Mennonite congregations. I have no issue with that religious aspect of the book since it is universal in Mennonite books. But the book lacks a great deal of information of a first person historical nature from the interviewees themselves. The maanner in which the interviews were utilized to write the book leaves a great deal to be desired in the final product. But I give full credit to Miriam Moyer for the massive amount of time she spent traveling the county, interviewing the subjects, and making an attempt to preserve their stories of the disaster as it affected them. I would love to listen to the tape recordings or read transcripts of them. They deserve to be preserved in a stable setting where general access could be granted to researchers and the general public under controlled conditions. One other shortcoming of the book is that there is very limited information from survivors of the dead victims and no full listing of the Knott County dead. But the book is worth reading from most of the general public. It can be purchased directly from Miriam Moyer at this address which is published in the book: Miriam Moyer 4589 Possum Trot Road Leburn, KY 41831 606-497-6527

Covid 19 And The Viet Nam War

Today, April 28, 2020, after only four months of the Covid 19 Pandemic in the United States, we will surpass the total number of US deaths in the Viet Nam War which lasted 20 years.  As of this morning, April 28, 2020, we have had 56,933 US deaths from Covid 19 and we are averaging about 2,000 deaths a day.  In the entire Viet Nam War, we had 58,220 deaths.  The first death in the Viet Nam War took place on June 8, 1956.  The first American soldier killed in the Vietnam War was Air Force T-Sgt. Richard B. Fitzgibbon Jr. He is listed by the U.S. Department of Defense as having a casualty date of June 8, 1956.  The last two deaths in the Viet Nam War took place on April 29, 1975.  On April 29, 1975, Charles McMahon (May 10, 1953 – April 29, 1975) and Darwin Lee Judge (February 16, 1956 – April 29, 1975) were the last two United States servicemen killed in Vietnam during the Vietnam War. The two men, both U.S. Marines, were killed in a rocket attack one day before the Fall of Saigon.  The 45th anniversary of those two deaths will be tomorrow, April 29, 2020.  If you do not see the irony in that, you are incapable of understanding irony.  The first US death from the Corona Virus is believed to have been on February 6, 2020, although we cannot precisely determine who the first casualty of the Corona Virus might have been or the precise date of that first death. We are also on the verge of becoming the first country in the world with 1 million cases of Covid 19.  In three months or so, the Corona Virus has killed more Americans than died in the Viet Nam War.  

And, the great majority of those deaths and those million plus cases of Covid 19 infection were preventable if TRAITOR Trump and his co-conspirators in Washington had done anything to save the country from the pandemic when they were repeatedly advised by the intelligence and health care communities in January and February 2020.  A news story has just been published by the Washington Post, the most reputable newspaper in the country, that the White House was advised and warned many times in the "president's" Daily Briefing Book in the period leading up to the deliberately late and inadequate action, or more appropriately inactions, from TRAITOR Trump and the White House. Nearly on a daily basis, the White House was warned that a pandemic was coming which was already proving to have devastating effects in China where it presumably originated and that it would have just as serious an effect on the United States unless decisive actions were taken to prevent it entering the country.   

In addition to those 58,000 plus deaths we have seen so far, the national economy has been devastated by both the virus and the deliberate refusals of the White House to do anything decisive to stop it.  Yes, congress passed a multi-trillion dollar relief bill but most of that money went to large corporations.  The White House has refused to help states and their governors to obtain the necessary testing equipment, respirators, ventilators, and personal protective equipment.  In fact, the inactions of the White House have created a horrible bidding war between the state governments and each other along with other countries which are also searching for those same critical supplies.  This situation is getting worse in many ways.  The meat packing industry has become a center of several outbreaks across several states including Iowa, Indiana, and Colorado.  Three plants which produce about 15% of the commercial meats in America have been forced to shut down due to the outbreaks within each of them.  According to the South Bend Tribune  "More than 150 of America’s largest meat processing plants operate in counties where the rate of coronavirus infection is already among the nation’s highest, based on the media outlets’ analysis of slaughterhouse locations and county-level COVID-19 infection rates."  That statistic is likely both a symptom of problems within the meat packing industry with the dense work settings and high speed demands on workers, and on the geography of where those plants are located.  But the meat packing industry has been enabled by the White House to stretch the limits of safe practices for all of the last three years.  Now, due to the Corona Virus, livestock farmers in the Midwest and South are being forced to consider euthanizing more than a million hogs because they are now past prime killing weight and now are literally eating their owners out of house and home with no market available.  Millions of tons and thousands of acres of vegetable crops are being plowed under by vegetable farmers all over the Midwest and South because they cannot get sufficient labor to pick those crops and do not have ready markets for many of them.  Dairy farmers are being forced to flush millions of gallons of unsold milk down drains even as lines at food banks are longer than at any time since the Great Depression and those same food banks cannot obtain sufficient food products to meet the needs of the suddenly destitute families in America.  America's farmers, especially small family farms, were already in the worst economic period they have faced since the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl.  Farm bankruptcies rose by 20% in 2019 and they are rising even more rapidly in 2020. 

The sad truth is that nearly everything about this disaster was avoidable if a competent, caring, legally, and duly elected President of the United States had been in office in January when the White House was first notified of the impending disaster by the intelligence and health care communities.  But, instead, we have a TRAITOR who usurped the White House with the assistance of Vladimir Putin and Russia living illegally in the White House, refusing to take any appropriate actions in the crisis, actually advising Americans to consider injecting disinfectants into their bodies, and denying state governors the assistance we must have in order to survive this crisis.  

A Tale Of Two Press Conferences And The Corona Virus!

Every day between 5pm and 7pm, two press conferences are televised in Kentucky.  One of those press conferences is also televised nationwide and that is a damn shame!  In Kentucky, at 5pm on every major television station in the state we see press conference by our Governor Andy Beshear.  It usually lasts for about an hour and is a shining example of what a press conference by an elected official working in a crisis should be.

Governor Andy Beshear of Kentucky

Governor Beshear is professional, strong, well informed, honest, accurate, compassionate, and everything a people in crisis should expect and receive from a leader at one of the worst times in the history of the state and nation.  This press conference has been taking place on a daily basis for about two weeks since Kentucky developed its first cases of Corona Virus in Jefferson and Fayette counties, the two truly urban counties in the state.  At the time these press conferences began, we had two cases in the state as I recall.  Today, March 28, 2020, we have roughly 300 cases statewide in at least 45 of the 120 counties.  The virus is spreading rapidly and randomly across the state just as it is across the nation.  Citizens are hoarding food, avoiding social contact, living in irrational fear, and doing both many good things and an equal number of ignorant, misinformed, and irrational things.   But Andy Beshear and his team of staff walk into the capitol press room each day cool, calm, collected, prepared with facts and information which is needed by every citizen of the state.  He begins the conferences these days with an affirmation and actually asks the audience to repeat it with him: "We Will Get Through This!  We Will Get Through This Together!"  Andy Beshear is everything a leader should be.  He has assembled the best team of the most talented people that the state can offer.  They deliver facts in a calm, supportive, professional, ethical manner and every citizen of Kentucky is better because of it.  

At about the time Andy Beshear's press conference is ending, the TRAITOR who illegally occupies the White House based on his TREASON with Russia also begins a daily press conference which is everything the press conferences of Governor Beshear's are not.  This TRAITOR is ignorant, uninformed, divisive, abrasive, uneducated, unintelligent, dishonest, amoral, and without one iota of compassion as he has always been.  He spits, sputters, foments greater fears among the populace because of his thousands of flaws, lies, and deceptions.  He does anything he can to avoid taking the appropriate blame for having, on a daily basis, increased the danger to every citizen of this country.  He blames others.  He lies repeatedly.  He attacks the press, the governors of many states, and at times even the victims of the Corona Virus.  He is an idiot, a pathological liar, an international and a domestic terrorist, and the personification of evil in the world.  He refuses to heed the advice of communicable disease, national security, health care, and government experts.  He uses the one actual professional on his team, Dr. Anthony Fauci, as a shield and a scapegoat.  He is a waste of time to every American who watches him and further endangers the lives of every resident of the United States and the world.  His rants have progressed to the point that the three major television networks usually cut away from his "press conferences" at or near 6:30pm and go on the air with the national news just as they did in the days when the Corona Virus was unknown in the world.  The television networks and their reporters recognize this TRAITOR for exactly what he is and this is as close to nothing as a living, breathing human can sink.  America is in the worst health care disaster since the polio epidemic of the early twentieth century and we have no leader at the top.  Instead we are saddled with a TRAITOR who does not care one iota bout the country or its citizens.  What do you as a citizen in what used to be the greatest democracy in the world going to do about this?  

Some Thoughts About The Buffalo Creek Flood, February 26, 1972

Today, February 26, 2020, is the 48th anniversary of the Buffalo Creek Flood on Buffalo Creek in Logan County West Virginia which killed 125 people due to the criminal negligence of Pittston Coal Company.  At the time of the flood, I had never been on Buffalo Creek or even in Logan County.  I did not know anyone on Buffalo Creek at the time of the incident.  But like many other key moments in the history of the country, Buffalo Creek and that flood were seared into my memory.  Just two years later, I was enrolled in the Southern Appalachian Circuit of Antioch College in Beckley, West Virginia, and became much better educated about the crimes which caused the Buffalo Creek Flood.  I made my first trip up Buffalo Creek sometime in 1984 as a door to door salesman but that first trip up the creek is seared into my memory just as the day it happened was seared.  I will always remember that as I drove up Buffalo Creek past the coal camps of Saunders, Pardee, Lorado, Craneco, Lundale, Stowe, Crites, Latrobe, Robinette, Amherstdale, Becco, Fanco, Braeholm, Accoville, Crown and Kistler, I could actually still see many signs of the flood.  I had grown up near Wayland, Kentucky, and if you have ever known one coal camp town in Central and Southern Appalachia, you have known all of them in some key ways.  The streets were nearly all laid out along a common pattern.  Nearly all the houses for common miners were built along one or two similar patterns, often in duplexes intended for two families.  As I drove up the creek, one of the first things I noticed was that there was actually a visible high water line along the sides of the hills up the valley where the age of the trees above and below that line were clearly different.  That forty foot high wall of water had ripped down the valley and literally torn the trees and vegetation out of the ground up to the limits of its reach.  You could also see a line, depending on the type of ground a particular coal camp had been built, where there were no houses or only severely damaged houses below it and intact houses and blocks of houses above it.  You could see a few intact stretches of the old, crooked, two lane highway which had survived the flood and long stretches where there was only the much straighter and wider new road which had been built after the disaster.  

But, if you met and talked to many of the surviving residents as I did, you would hear stories if the people trusted you about how and why they had survived the flood, some due purely to blind luck, others who had left the creek because it was apparent for several days that the two sludge dams in the head of the creek would fail in the heavy rains that came that week.  You would also hear heart rending stories of the dead who had died purely because state and federal regulators in West Virginia had ignored many warning signs before the flood, had refused to force Pittston to properly repair and reinforce the aging and overloaded dams.  You would hear stories from local residents who had survived the flood and spent days without basic services as they helped search for the missing and dead.  You would hear mothers and fathers grieving for dead children, surviving children mourning parents who would never see those children grown or see their grandchildren, you could meet the undertaker who buried many of the dead and refused to discuss the disaster, and you could also meet the people who had been forever damaged in heart and soul by the flood and its multiple aftermaths and could not and would not ever discuss it because they had no words to tell their losses and grief.  

Every year, when this day comes, I remember Buffalo Creek where I have spent many days, met many survivors, and learned a great deal about just how corrupt American corporations and politicians had shirked their moral, ethical, and legal responsibilities on Buffalo Creek.  I remember that many good, decent, hard working men and women, numerous potentially successful children, and a lot of older citizens were cheated out of a decent end to decent lives because Pittston was not held responsible for their crimes on Buffalo Creek both before and after the flood.  May all the dead rest in peace!