Eight eastern Kentucky counties are among the top ten in the country with the most natural disasters.

That's according to a new report from Rebuild by Design, which tracked data from FEMA between 2011 and 2023.

We spoke to one of the authors of the Atlas of Disaster and Accountability Report who says while natural disasters can't be prevented, there is a lot that can be done to lessen the devastation.

What the data looks at is it's basically two things.

One is the occurrence of major disaster declarations.

And we only looked at the very, very, very worst.

So these are the major disaster declarations altogether.

From 2011 to 2023, Kentucky experienced 28 different federal disaster declarations for major storms.

Kentucky is way above the national average.

The national average for counties was three disasters and Kentucky had 5.8.

Kentucky has experienced a huge swath of climate disasters from severe storms and flooding and landslides that tend to be the ones that are more frequently so tornadoes and wind and severe winter storms that tend to be less frequently.

And the second thing that we looked at is two types of assistance that happens only after a disaster.

One is public assistance and the other one is hazard mitigation.

We looked at a number of different parts, public assistance, which was $944 million, and that's the funds that come to a community after a disaster.

Then there's another type of funds that come after a disaster, and that's called hazard mitigation.

And there's about $47 million of hazard mitigation.

And that's to help communities think about preparing for the next disaster.

And Kentucky has gotten almost $400 million of community development block grant, disaster recovery funds and total for Kentucky.

You've gotten about $1.4 billion between 2011 and 2023.

But Rebuild by Design is calling for is that a majority of the federal funding get pushed from post-disaster funding to pre-disaster mitigation.

There's so much you can do from the individual scale to the community scale.

So on the individual scale, for instance, the government can help you with strengthening your building codes or coming up with incentives for ways that you can make sure that your your roof is on better.

You know, that it's made with better materials that won't come off after a storm.

And then on the street level, you can start thinking about porous surfaces, like how do we make sure that our communities are green and that there is space for the water to come into the land and to be held there in order for the sewer system to hold up after a storm?

There's so much we can do and our message is really about having these conversations now.

We wanted to show that whether you're in an urban place or a rural place, you are experiencing the same disasters and it's time that we start working together.

To see where your county ranks when it comes to natural disasters, go to rebuild by design.

Dot org.