COLUMBIA, Ky. – Lovonne Fleming-Richardson knows firsthand what it is like to be the victim of flooding, and how long it can take to fully recover.
Lovonne Fleming-Richardson was out of her Pike County, Kentucky, home for 739 days following record flooding that swept through Eastern Kentucky in July 2022.
Fleming-Richardson’s home was spared in the floods caused by last month’s heavy rains in the region, but she knows a lot of people who were not as fortunate.
That’s why Fleming-Richardson is among a group of Lindsey Wilson College faculty, staff, students and alumni who have established a GoFundMe account to assist Lindsey Wilson students affected by the floods. The floods especially affected Lindsey Wilson students who attend the college’s extended campuses in Hazard, Kentucky, and Logan, West Virginia.
The GoFundMe effort is raising money to help Lindsey Wilson students replace items they’ve lost in the floods, such as textbooks, computers and other school supplies.
“I know the frustrations and the anger that people go through when something like this happens,” said Fleming-Richardson, who graduated from Lindsey Wilson’s graduate program in counseling and is the founder and chief operating officer of Appalachian Community Care.
As a Pike County native and CEO of a private mental health agency that serves more than 500 clients in the region, Fleming-Richardson said that it isn’t always easy to offer help to area residents.
“In Eastern Kentucky, folks are very prideful,” she said. “They think, ‘I never thought that I would be receiving free meals, free cleaning supplies or anything like that.’ But when basic necessities are not available, everybody’s in the same recovery mode. So asking for help is very challenging. People don’t want to swallow their pride. I didn’t either when I was affected by the floods, but you do swallow your pride and you take a free hot meal.”
Lindsey Wilson counseling professors Nicole Schnopp-Wyatt and Daniel Wyatt can relate to those challenges. Nicole was teaching graduate classes at the Lindsey Wilson Logan campus when the deluge of rains turned creeks into rivers and caused rivers to spill over their banks and into communities.
Schnopp-Wyatt canceled classes when the weather took a turn for the worse. She safely returned to her family’s home, which is near the top of a mountain in a Pike County hollow, but not before collecting her mother, Wanda Schnopp, who lives on a “pretty big creek.”
Although floodwaters didn’t reach Schnopp-Wyatt’s home, it lost power, water and internet access for more than a week.
“We really had no idea what was going on,” said Schnopp-Wyatt. “So the next morning I climbed up the mountain behind us where we could get one bar of service on our phones. I had all these messages from friends who lived out of town and wanted to know if we were OK. They said, ‘I’m so sorry your town is devastated.’ And I came back to the house and I said to Daniel, ‘Oh, it’s bad.’”
Things went from bad to worse when the rains were followed by a snowfall, which Fleming-Richardson said made it even harder for residents to clean and recover homes and businesses.
“After the rains we were pounded with a snowstorm, and people were trying to get the muck out of their homes but there was frozen mud,” she said.
As Schnopp-Wyatt pointed out, the flooding left behind a host of long-term problems and challenges.
“After the water recedes, everybody’s just throwing out almost all of their belongings,” she said. “And there were mudslides that were just just horrific. So a lot of the roads were shut down from the mudslides. Near us there was a coal train sitting on the outskirts of town where they were just filling it with huge chunks of rocks and soil, and whatever else they could scrape up because there was no other place to put it.”
And then there is the challenge of finding either a temporary or new place to live. As Fleming-Richardson pointed out, some flooding victims will move in with family members and friends until they have a permanent place, but others will seek refuge at temporary shelters, such as Pike Central High School.
Schnopp-Wyatt’s daughter, Indigo, is a senior at Pike Central High School, which has temporarily canceled classes so it could be used as a shelter. Indigo helped serve the people.
“She loves to bake, so she made homemade cookies to hand out with the hot meals they were serving,” said Schnopp-Wyatt. “On Saturday night, the first night of the floods, they had 80 beds. Then on Sunday they had 120 people in there, and then by Sunday afternoon there were people sleeping in the cars and vehicles in the parking lot. Some of the people had their pets in their cars with them.”
Lindsey Wilson’s graduate classes in the region have continued, although many have shifted to an online format. Schnopp-Wyatt said the students “aren’t thrilled about taking classes online, but it at least keeps them on track to graduate on time.”
And although there has been a temporary shift in how Lindsey Wilson is delivering its classes in the region, Fleming-Richardson said she knows that the students, like all of the residents in the region, will prove to be resilient.
“We will climb our way out of this, one step at a time,” she said. “We’ll get to the top of the mountain and recover, but we’ll do it by taking one step at a time. And the steps are slow, the steps are hard, they’re emotional and they’re life-altering, but it’s manageable because we have no other choice.”
To Help
To donate to the GoFundMe effort to help Lindsey Wilson students affected by the February floods, go to: https://www.gofundme.com/f/eastern-kentucky-students-need-your-help?attribution_id=sl:1ef72a34-ede7-4188-96ef-58ab4f77f5a1&lang=en_US&utm_campaign=fp_sharesheet&utm_content=amp10_t1-amp13_t1&utm_medium=customer&utm_source=copy_link
PHOTO – Lindsey Wilson College alumna Lovonne Fleming-Richardson of Pike County, Kentucky, has worked with professors in the college’s School of Professional Counseling to assist Lindsey Wilson students affected by the recent floods that swept through Eastern Kentucky and West Virginia.
PHOTO – Lindsey Wilson College counseling professor Nicole Schnopp-Wyatt of Pike County, Kentucky, is working with other Lindsey Wilson professors and alumni to help residents in Eastern Kentucky and West Virginia who were affected by the recent floods that swept through the region.
(Duane Bonifer – Lindsey Wilson College)