By State › Kentucky

Kentucky: Overview

Download all of Kentucky as PDF Print

Everything in the main manual and the skill guides applies in Kentucky exactly as written. What’s different here is the specific hazard profile and the state, local, and legal context around it. This page is the starting point; the other three pages under Kentucky go deeper on laws, local resources, and the data behind the risks named here.

December 2021: the deadliest tornado in Kentucky history

On the night of December 10, 2021, a high-end EF4 tornado tracked 165.7 miles across western Kentucky, an unusually long and unusually late-season path, killing 57 people and becoming both the deadliest tornado in Kentucky’s recorded history and the deadliest anywhere in the U.S. during the month of December. Mayfield took the worst of it: the storm collapsed the Mayfield Consumer Products candle factory and devastated the downtown business district, with 24 deaths in the county alone. See the Risks page for the full data.

July 2022: catastrophic flash flooding in the Appalachian hollows

Seven months later, a fundamentally different disaster struck the opposite end of the state. Slow-moving “training” thunderstorms dumped 14-16 inches of rain on parts of eastern Kentucky over a few days in late July 2022, and the region’s narrow hollows and steep terrain turned that rain into flash floods with almost no warning. The flooding killed at least 43 people, damaged or destroyed nearly 9,000 homes, and required more than 600 helicopter rescues.

What this means for how you use the rest of this manual

The manual’s Tier structure and the skill guides apply without modification. What’s different in Kentucky: tornado preparedness matters even outside the traditional spring season, the 2021 outbreak struck in December, and households in eastern Kentucky’s hollows and narrow valleys need a real flash flood evacuation plan given how quickly water can rise in that terrain, regardless of whether a location has flooded before.

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