‘Starting to take a toll.’ Tornadoes, floods, COVID and Kentucky’s disaster fatigue.
Gov. Andy Beshear was very honest with us on Monday at a briefing to discuss the total devastation and lost lives caused by tornadoes in Western Kentucky on Friday.
“I know like the folks in Western Kentucky, I’m not doing so well today, and I’m not sure how many of us are,” he said Monday at a press conference at which he had to swallow tears back several times. “We’re going to keep putting one foot in front of the other and push through this.Everybody out there get the help you need ... To the people of Western KY, we’re not going anywhere.”
A year ago Monday, things were looking up. After a year of COVID, the first vaccines arrived, welcomed jubilantly by Beshear and many others. Instead, the virus is still raging, and in February, Eastern Kentucky was hit with ice storms and flooding. Now we’re facing what many think may be the worst natural disaster to ever hit Kentucky. Disaster fatigue is setting in.
“Since the day he went into office, our governor has dealt with one disaster after another,” said Melissa Jessie, the public information officer for Estill County Emergency Management, which dealt with historic flooding there last year. “He’s been very resilient, but I know when I was watching his press conference this morning you can tell everything is starting to take a toll on him, and I think that’s a good representation of how most responders across the state feel. It’s been nonstop for years, it feels like.”
Jessie has been in her job for 17 years and faced a train derailment, gas explosion, ice storms and constant flooding, including last year, when 80 homes in Estill County were destroyed.
“With emergency response, probably the first two or three days, you’re running on pure adrenaline and in Kentucky, a lot of responders are volunteers, so for us, it’s nothing to work 18, 20 hours, sleep for four and go right back at it and it’s like that for days,” she said. “You’re physically tired, you’re mentally tired and the emotional toll in these smaller communities is excruciating. You know these people, they’re your friends and your family, and they’re begging for help and this will go on for weeks.”
Many of these smaller communities have also been hit with COVID deaths, an underlying layer of trauma. Jessie said many first responders and public officials tend not to think about themselves until they’re completely overwhelmed.
“But it’s very important to take the time to reflect and talk to other people,” she said. “In Western Kentucky, you’re going to have responders with PTSD and other issues from recovering bodies and the devastation in general. It’s a lot.”
Melinda Moore, a clinical psychologist and associate professor at Eastern Kentucky University, said Beshear has been incredibly strong and stoic through COVID, “but there’s only so much he can take. We’re all experiencing this — so how do we handle multiple traumas and the loss of life.”
The answer, Moore says, may have been found during COVID.
“Through COVID, we learned so much about our internal resources,” Moore said. “I believe in the resilience of individuals and we have been through horrific things before.”
Moore commended Beshear for not just showing his own disaster fatigue, and addressing the state’s vicarious trauma, but also for focusing on a more positive future. “We are not promised tomorrow, all we have is today,” she said. “We have to say we will be ok in the future. We have to give children a sense of hope, we can’t be despairing. We are guaranteed to lose things in life, but it doesn’t mean everything is awful all the time.”
For the worst of the hurt, Kentucky shows its best. Politics and cultural differences have been shoved aside in the effort to help. They’ll come back, just as bad things will happen again. But as Moore said: “If we have each other, that’s a lot.”
This story was originally published December 13, 2021 at 3:07 PM.
