>> Coming up on Kentucky EDITION, we look back at the top stories in Kentucky for 2022. from the second natural disaster to devastate the state in less than a year.

>> You have everything bad.

You work your heart law for and then the rain comes in.

It's just walk right.

>> With a final report.

>> We are certainly disappointed in the results of amendment to the fight is far from over.

We are you know that legislators are already planning a more restrictions on abortion and birth control access.

>> And we say a final farewell to some prominent Kentucky.

>> And his daughter.

Production of Kentucky Edition is made possible in part by the KET Endowment for Kentucky Productions.

The owner Press Endowment for Public Affairs and the KET Millennium Fund.

♪ ♪ >> Good evening and welcome to Kentucky EDITION on Monday, January second, 2023, our first show the new Year.

I'm Casey Parker Bell filling in for Renee Shaw.

>> Tonight we're highlighting the stories that made headlines around the state in 2022. topping the list.

Kentucky's continuing recovery efforts after 2 major natural disasters struck opposite ends of the state.

Less than your part.

The latest happening in July in eastern Kentucky for several counties were devastated by historic flooding.

The area was hit more that with more than a foot of rain.

Most of it falling on July 28th a state of emergency was declared for 13 counties after flash flooding wiped out homes, businesses, bridges and roads and killed.

43 people, including 4 children of those deaths.

17 were not county.

We were in that community just days after the floods talking to some people who've lost everything, but we're helping others rebuild.

>> We didn't think this was going to happen as you go to or not.

New, you're fine.

You have everything that you worked or how long for and then the rain comes in.

It's just swap the right.

People heard.

>> So last forever change families that's broken.

That to.

>> Can ever be put back together.

I know many.

>> Franz have relatives that lost their homes.

There's been people who lost their lives is is total a man.

You know, everywhere you go, there's something wrong.

You know, we have really came together here with the community.

>> To bring donations and to not get sports plex, several resources that are people so much need right now to assist them on the.

>> Their road to recovery.

I know that there's people out here working as help and that's lost everything.

It's very uplifting, though.

Want to see our neighbors coming together.

I mean, I just it's a just brings tears to your a**.

>> Yes, off a family that came in and filled up your shopping cart with Adams to take back with him as she was leaving.

She fed.

I'll be back.

In fact, are noon to help work.

>> So I think that speaks so much to the heart of the community that I've seen.

>> They may be in need and they may have suffered damage at their property, but they're still helping their neighbors to the fire start school and, you know, we don't.

>> We don't want to be forgot about it because people are going to continue to come back for assistance.

You Rome wasn't built in a day and and the rebuild process here is will take years to come.

>> The catastrophic flooding forced Eastern Kentucky school districts to delay the start of the school year.

Several school suffered structural damage or submerged in water.

Letcher County returned in late September, but not everyone return to their old school students from West White West Whitesburg Elementary are now sharing space with Letcher County Central High School work continues, restore their damaged building.

It's exciting.

It was so great to see our kids come back >> the flooding affected every part of what you're counting.

So probably 75 members of my staff have significant loss, lost homes, cars, property damage.

I have dealt with the same things that our students and families are dealing with.

Everyone who's been impacted has been here every single day, getting ready for this very first day of school.

They've worked in the towers, getting their classrooms ready.

>> Working to help other teachers in the building working to get their families ready in so many of those people, Weaver even reached out to tie your son.

Thanks for you that a lot.

Now we don't need my family.

Doesn't need to give it to someone else.

They have the compassion they had to look for those students and they had to look for people.

>> We're all affected in some But the people came together.

It was the amazing a sight to see and maybe very proud Letcher County.

I'm proud to be from the county.

>> We've had every staff member to some special training for trauma after a natural disaster.

we're here to support our students and not just their basic needs, but in their emotional health as well.

Our kids, our most precious commodity.

So anything that we can do to make it better for them.

So help the situation to move them forward and passed the worst parts of the U.S. that we're willing to do it.

>> The floods also took a devastating toll on Appalachian Arts and heritage and not county.

The Hindman Settlement School which house the collection of books, photographs, musical instruments and other items dating back more than a century was also damage.

Staff and volunteers have been working to salvage as much as possible after the flood.

>> I had a conversation with a 94 year-old woman on the porch of the day who said we lost absolutely everything, but we're OK because nobody died.

That's how bad this flood is.

Is that?

Okay means nobody's It's hard to imagine that that Little Creek running out there got up into the parking lot, led along gotten to the building got into their with such force that it blew the doors.

We have a lot of very historical not only related to the founding and the operation of our school, but just, you know, journals and letters and photographs of this region.

Our biggest concern was fired.

So many of our records were in fireproof cabinets and 120 years.

We never had flood waters in our buildings like this and to have 5 feet in our archives was just beyond our our worst nightmares.

I'm a writer.

I was an English professor.

>> I'm seeing books.

From, you know, to seeing these these historic new to full books that are just completely destroyed and that the archivist said have been volunteering lake from Bree and all these other places of said this one is not salvageable.

That just breaks my heart because these books have a history.

They were here for a reason.

We realize that.

>> If we're going to have make a real effort to save anything we had to get help.

And so we put the word out to our fairly vast network of supporters at times we had as many as I-35 volunteers who were taking your documents of separating them and blotting them and hang in the draw.

We actually went up to lows in about 5 to chest freezers and so freezing them kind of suspense them.

And it gives us time once we've dealt with the immediate need that then we can turn our attention to things that are in our freezers with archives in particular, >> The only way we've been able to save anything has been through volunteers and donors because I'm not an expert in in these archives materials on how much of what we've triage has been salvageable.

But that's kind of how I've been thinking.

It is like we had a gunshot wound and we managed to get them to the hospital and now it's up to the professionals to to see what the recovery is going to be like.

>> Eastern Kentucky's deadly flooding came almost 7 months after the state was hit by historic tornado outbreak.

One people lost their lives when 2 powerful tornadoes tore through western Kentucky.

This is video of one of the tornadoes taken near Muhlenberg County.

According to the National Weather Service, this violent, the EF 4 tornado started in Tennessee and tracked across 11 counties in western Kentucky.

The tornado's path was more than 165 miles long.

The longest for tornado in U.S. history and it cut right through the city of Mayfield, Graves, County.

We recently sat down with the city's fire chief as the one-year anniversary of the tornado outbreak approach.

He talked about living through and responding to one of the worst natural disasters in the state's history.

>> The morning of December, the 10th I was driving through town there was just a a kind of an ominous The skies didn't look great.

and I called in to the station and I said, hey, just in case was calling a few extra people to not one of my firefighters.

And are we.

We stepped out the front door of the building.

And and we looked.

Back towards the West and we could see lightning.

And then we started hearing of a low rumble.

Some hail started coming down.

And then the wind started picking up and and that lightning that was just normal.

It's a normal looking lightning.

But it kind of turned some something I've never seen before.

We gathered everybody and we took shelter within the building.

And so that's that's where we we rode out the storm.

Probably the scariest to 2 minutes of my life within 30 seconds of the storm passing over we started it and just getting this passed out, the calls, one of those being the candle factory.

We had structure fires.

We had people trapped.

We had medical calls.

We had a generator.

We really the only lot in town at that point.

It was total with the exception of our building.

And so as people were coming out of their crawling out of the BRI, they started walking towards us.

We school buses brought in from the county we triage patients in station one.

Some we sent to the hospital by others.

We sent to a shelter and Michael Haas School in the gym.

But we just don't we have hundreds of people that just that walked to station one that not because they were just walking towards any lot that they could that they can find within an hour hour and a half of the tornado had every member of our department have reported to work and for about the next 36 to 48 hours, nobody left nobody wanted to come out of the field to take a break.

They they wanted to KET looking.

They wanted to go move on to the next house.

They wanted to go through another section of the candle factory, debris.

That level of I've never seen anything like it.

It very proud of them.

Fire station was destroyed.

It was station one, you know that my first day of work with this department was was in that building.

We took a lot of pride in that building.

And, you know, they're not of the storm.

It.

It kept us alive.

You know, in the months after we were just trying to get back to some sense of normalcy.

>> Get back into our day-to-day routines.

The biggest challenge was debris removal.

After the storm could you can't rebuild until it's all gone.

But we we got it.

Now.

We have the that blank canvas to work with.

And so now we have to we have to bring people back.

>> Marion, a town of about 3,000 Crittendon County has been dealing with an ongoing disaster, a lack of water.

The crisis began April 27th when a levee on Lake George, the town's primary water source was breached and had to be drained.

Governor Andy Beshear declared a state of emergency for the city on June.

18th, Kentucky National Guard troops distributed bottled water to people living there.

City officials say recent rainfall has brought some relief and they are working on intermediate and long-term plans to permanently solve the water crisis.

♪ ♪ Protesters filled the streets of Lexington in June following a U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning Roe versus Wade.

The Dobbs ruling into the constitutional right to abortion after almost 50 years, leaving abortion up to the states to decide.

Kentucky was one of more than a dozen states with trigger laws on the books set to go into effect.

If Roe was overturned.

Kentucky's trigger ban outlaws abortion and all but life-threatening cases in November, voters rejected a ballot measure removing the right to an abortion under the state constitution.

The measure was narrowly defeated by a vote around 52 to 48% while abortion rights advocates say the results are big win for reproductive rights.

Both sides say the fight is not over.

>> We've been working on this for over 18 months.

We've been over thousands of doors.

We've talked to thousands of and resoundingly.

You know, when we were doing this work over and over again, we heard that this went too far that people want access to abortion.

And so this is vindication for something I already KET about Kentucky.

And now we have the numbers to prove it.

>> We are certainly disappointed in the results of amendment 2.

But, you know, the Pro Life movement here in Kentucky across the nation.

As always, we remain steadfast in our resolve to continue defending life.

You know, from our perspective Amendment 2 was a a opportunity simply to add clarity and an extra level of protection against the potential of an activist court decision, I would say was a missed opportunity.

I think at the end of the day there were some voters who who may have normally inclined just didn't want to take the extra step of of of amending the Kentucky Constitution.

One of the things we found from doing this work was that abortion wasn't as polarizing as has had been led to believe for all these years.

Kentucky actually has a pro-choice, pro-abortion electorate.

>> We and that transcends party affiliation.

Religious identities because abortion is something that is not unique to one party.

Everybody knows and loves someone who's had enough portion and Kentucky's restrictions on abortion care have gone too far.

>> It's important for folks to Kentuckians to recognize that our laws protecting preborn children remain in place.

And so the reality is that just means the status quo continues in Kentuckyian the status quo from our perspective is, you know, strong pro laws have been passed and we continue to look forward to doing all that we can to ensure unborn lives are protected.

>> The fight is far from over.

We are you know, that legislators are already restrictions on abortion and birth control access.

We will also be in the court's next week.

It was a week from Election Day.

The 15th that we will be Planned Parenthood and the ACLU will start case with the Supreme Court on this six-week ban and the trigger ban, which now we have a pathway forward to start him, you know, bring back some modicum of access to Kentucky with >> pro-life majorities in and those that reelected and even some of the other that won by candidates that hold the prolife use in the General Assembly.

I still continue to remain confident in desire of Kentuckians to want to protect unborn In the law.

I will say that, you know, because of this more Kentuckians are now going to be paying attention to their legislators will bring Kurt.

>> They may have continued to send anti-choice legislators to Frankfort, but at the door, we hope we heard repeatedly that they were going to be calling them and making sure that they KET that they did not have a mandate on abortion >> I we have a abortion access electorate that has woken up and is paying attention.

>> One week after Kentucky voters rejected the measure.

>> The state Supreme Court heard arguments challenging the abortion ban, the state Supreme Court could rule any time whether the law should be suspended again until a broader case challenging the constitutionality is decided.

Amendment 2 wasn't the only measure rejected by voters in the 2022 midterm elections.

Voters also said no to amendment one which would have allowed the General Assembly to call itself into special session.

Other headlines from the 2022 midterm election.

U.S.

Senator Rand Paul secured a 3rd term defeating Charles Booker by more than 20 percentage points.

The outspoken conservative has railed repeatedly.

Can socialism foreign aid and what he sees as excessive spending that he blames for driving up the nation's debt.

He echoed those libertarian themes in declaring victory on election night.

>> We come together under the belief the government is instituted among men and women to preserve our God given.

>> Period.

>> Our desire is not to rule over others but a largely leave.

People love.

>> It is this system.

>> Of constitutional checks on power that has allowed America to become the freest nation ever known.

>> Kentucky's U.S. House delegation will have a new face.

Democrat Morgan McGarvey won the U.S. House seat in the 3rd Congressional district replacing John Yarmouth.

The 3rd district congressman for 16 years.

He says he's ready to work in the House led by Republicans.

>> I have not been in the super minority every single day that I've been in office.

Never let that change the way legislate.

I made a promise 10 years ago have stuck to it than that.

I'm going to stand up for what I believe in the fight for the ball movement into the way we're trying to get things done about it.

>> The rest of Kentucky's U.S. House delegation.

All Republicans won with ease other winners in the midterms.

Craig Greenberg was elected mayor of Louisville, Lexington, reelected Mayor Linda Gorton and Republicans added to their majorities in the Kentucky General Assembly with Democrat incumbents.

Jeffrey Donahue, Charles Miller, Patti Minter and Minority Whip Andrew Hatton all fall.

Also topping political and medical news in Kentucky, Governor Andy Beshear's executive order allowing some Kentuckians to possess and use medical.

Cannabis.

That is legally purchased in another state to treat specific health conditions.

The executive order goes into effect on January.

1st, the announcement comes weeks after a new report from the governor's Medical Cannabis advisory group that suggests 90% support to legalize medical marijuana in Kentucky.

♪ The deadly shooting of Breonna Taylor in Louisville galvanized a movement across the United States against police brutality and racism.

>> In August, almost 2 years after she was killed.

The U.S. Department of Justice Church for former Louisville police officers with federal crimes for the botched raid that led to Taylor's death.

The 26 year-old was shot and killed in her home on March.

13th 2020 by police officers executing a search warrant.

Taylor's boyfriend shot at them.

He says he didn't know they were police.

They fired back killing Taylor.

No drugs were found.

The U.S. Department of Justice accuses Joshua Jaynes and Kelly Goodlett of conspiring to falsify an investigative document.

Sergeant Kyle Meany is accused of lying to the FBI.

Brett Hankison is accused of using excessive force members of Taylor's family, along with local activists celebrated the changes the charges and thanks.

Federal officials.

They also had harsh words for Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron who declined to take action against the officers.

>> I waited.

174 days.

For today.

We set this.

We've been saying it since 2020.

We've asked and they fly with us and Rihanna was not involved with this and they should not be at Breonna's home.

>> We've been saying that officer should be held accountable for Breonna Taylor's murder.

And today is the first day towards getting that justice.

>> In Metro settled a lawsuit with Taylor's boyfriend Kenneth Walker for 2 million dollars.

2022 saw the retirement of Kentucky Supreme Court chief Justice John Mitten step down after leading the state's highest court for 14 years.

Men is only the second person to be chosen served 4 terms as the chief justice, the justices of the Kentucky Supreme Court voted to elect Justice Lawrence p vanmeter as their next chief justice.

He will be serving a four-year term January 2nd.

♪ ♪ >> 2 country music icons, a legendary Kentucky coach and the former governor.

They are just a few of the notable Kentuckyian we said goodbye to this year.

Here's a look at who we lost in 2022.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ >> I think guys legacy is a person who took over the program when it was it, one of its darkest periods you and say was on campus.

They won only 2 games for a couple years running and then all of a sudden they won 7 games and might have one more and sent this fan base into a frenzy that can go to a ballgame.

But they started going to games we've got a shot of winning this thing.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ I do Miss Kentucky.

>> Asher do cause if I'm home and I met my mind, goes to one of his truck back in butcher, holler.

You know, it goes right back to butcher, holler.

The things I did then because that's that's I guess that's what really I got me ready for everything.

♪ And his daughter.

>> Afternoon water.

♪ Was hard.

I would say we worked hard.

>> We have the ball on the left.

Could a holler.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ >> If you want to know the measure of a man.

>> Watch how he dies.

Our father died.

Beautiful death.

With all 5 children.

By his side.

♪ ♪ >> We hope you'll join us again tomorrow night at 6.30, Eastern 5.30, central for Kentucky Edition, we inform connect and inspire subscribe to our weekly Kentucky Edition email newsletter and watch full episodes and clips a K E T Dot Org.

>> You can also find Kentucky Edition on the PBS video app on your mobile device and smart TV and follow KET on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to stay alert.

Thank you for joining us.

We'll be back tomorrow with some news from the Kentucky General Assembly.

Is they have their first day of the new legislative session.

I'm Casey Parker Bell filling in for Renee Shaw.

Take good care and enjoy the new Year.

♪ ♪ ♪