Woodford County is in the middle of cleanup efforts following the catastrophic flood said hit the state earlier this month.

Kentucky Edition traveled to the Riverside neighborhood of Shaw Acres to see how survivors are rebuilding.

This was the big one.

This was the flood, you know, a record flood that everybody had always talked about, but nobody really, truly imagined would happen.

And so we're living through it, but we're in full recovery mode.

It's all hands on deck.

And, folks are, you know, I think they're seeing the the light at the end of the tunnel.

Things won't be fully back to normal for anybody for quite some time.

Most people are still displaced, and they're still, you know, just actually moving all of the, the mud out the, the debris, everything in their house and getting cleaned up.

So we're still in a pretty heavy cleanup stage in Shaw Acres.

These properties saw in excess of 48ft and the elevation of the floodwaters.

So that meant, multiple feet of water and in several of the properties, some of them said a little lower or they're closer to the river frontage and and at least one case, the water line is on the shingles of the roof.

We don't know exactly how many people were displaced, but we do know that, somewhere in the neighborhood of 250 homes are impacted.

And, again, most of these are not livable and some will even ultimately be, condemned and potentially torn down.

The neighbor who lives up the street from us, he called me.

And that's the reason we evacuated.

His house had already flooded.

His house was underwater almost up to the top of the roof, and he called me on Sunday afternoon, and my wife and I thought we would stay because we thought our house was up high enough.

We called the sheriff, and the sheriff said he would call the search and rescue.

Luckily, they hadn't left the area.

Their inflatable boat was about 3.5ft below that windowsill.

I had to help my wife climb out that window into the boat, which I did.

We got her into the boat and then we have two wonderful puppy dogs.

But it was, pretty crazy to have to go out of a two and a half storey window into a boat to, to be saved.

So we are very thankful that they were here.

We're encouraging the property owners to do as they begin to take inventory and deal with the clean ups of their property.

Bring it roadside.

And that allows our road crews with material handling equipment and our contractors to, appropriately dispose of the debris.

There's a big lift when you're talking about flood debris.

You have vegetative debris, which we deal with commonly during severe weather.

We also have construction and demolition debris.

So drywall and, that sort of thing.

I don't know any property owner that's got, you know, leftover can of paint from a home improvement project, you know, that can't go to a normal landfill.

So household hazardous waste has to be separated.

And then there's appliances, which we call white debris.

And thankfully, a lot of that will go to recycle.

But it's hard to sort that on a narrow country road.

And make sure that the debris gets into the right pile so it's disposed of properly.

We really need the federal assistance to come in and help folks and where that's not going to be there.

Some folks won't be able to afford to come back.

And that's a tragedy in and of the disaster itself.

We will never return to the way we were prior to the 2025 flood.

But our goal as county government is to rebuild stronger and make sure that we're more resilient.

Those that choose to stay and rebuild, we're going to be there to support them.

And we're also going to make sure that folks find good long term living arrangements and that we take care of everybody, no matter where they are, how they were impacted, that we make sure that they rebuild their own lives better and stronger.

There's no way we could have we could have saved ourselves.

There's a lot of things I should have done differently, a lot of things I will do differently.

I've lost, like I said, a lot of vehicles and a lot of equipment.

That is, it is not insured.

I'm going to have a different life than what I planned, but I've got a life to live anyway, so I'm happy.