This weekend marks the two year anniversary of catastrophic flooding that struck eastern Kentucky.

Intense storms over the course of several days brought heavy rainfall, flash floods and severe river flooding.

More than a foot of rain fell in some areas.

45 people were killed as a result of the flooding.

More than 1400 people rescued, almost half of those by helicopter.

13 counties were declared federal disaster areas close to 10,000 homes were damaged or destroyed, almost 74% occurring in just four counties.

Breath it, not Letcher and Perry.

Those leading the charge to rebuild say while devastating the disaster has led to real progress on an issue the region has been facing for decades.

The need for affordable housing.

Our Clayton Dalton has more on what's been done in the two years since the flooding and the work that remains.

When deadly flooding hit parts of eastern Kentucky two years ago.

Whitesburg and Letcher County were hit particularly hard.

Here in Letcher County, we lost 25% of our homes were significantly impacted, displacing people.

There's so much work to do.

But in that crisis, there's opportunity.

Floyd County, just to the north, was hit hard by the flooding as well.

We had 500 people that were homeless.

This place was full of individuals who woke up the that that morning and their homes were gone.

Their entire life was gone.

Williams says new housing options for flood victims are almost nonexistent.

The housing situation in Floyd County, similar to what it is across the country, there is no housing.

When houses go on the market, they're being sold that quick.

That's the reason we have to work to build these new homes.

We're going to have to build new housing because the homes don't exist to put these people in.

But there is hope.

Seth Long leads Homes Inc., a housing development company that serves Eastern Kentucky.

We build new houses over the 40 years, we built 275 new houses in a region where the housing market is broken.

Long says the lack of safe and affordable housing is a problem that can no longer sit on the back burner.

We've been doing this for decades and we haven't been able to get in the conversation or get housing to be important.

But since the flood impacted so many, the like kind of came on and said people said we can't keep doing what we've been doing.

We need to do something else.

Plus, we need more housing.

We've lost a lot.

So now the citizens, the politicians state government folks are all saying housing is one of the biggest needs here in the community.

Jim King is the CEO of Fahey, a national organization that helps build homes in Appalachia.

He says the low supply of housing in the region is a serious problem.

We don't have enough units that are not just on the homeownership side, but then that affects cost of renting.

And and so we're just seeing a lot of inflated prices and a lot of a lot of really high rent in places that already people couldn't afford.

Average household incomes in Appalachia are about half the national average, making it even more difficult for people to rent or buy homes.

Moving forward, King says building homes on high ground can protect families from these natural disasters.

Governor Beshear and his team have been working on these idea of these high ground sites.

These feel like once in a lifetime events, they not they aren't really.

And so the idea that we would like to get people moved out of harm's way as best we can.

They weren't really in the floodplain because this was not a 100 year event.

This was a lifetime event, you know, a historic type of of of catastrophe.

So we're expecting to see a lot of the site work done on the high ground sites.

There's enough to to reach probably 600 lots, give or take.

And I know the governor and his folks are looking at more potential sites as well.

Amidst the struggle to heal and rebuild.

There's progress, innovation and hope.

Since the flood in just two years.

We finished 21 new houses.

Five of those houses are net zero houses that will generate as much electricity as the family uses with a house electric bill of $21.50 a month.

That's a big deal.

We're going to build anywhere from 2 to 300 new homes and we're going to be assisting in the building of 2 to 300 new homes.

A lot of them is going to be through the FEMA program, a lot of them not.

We're going to be doing through mountain housing.

And but we certainly understand if we're going to grow our community, we got we we have to get additional housing and keep our population.

And for Seth Long, there's a silver lining to this tragedy.

The flood was probably the best, worst thing that ever happened to this community in the way of houses.

It's is sad what's happened, but it's opened a lot of doors of opportunity to do things differently in the years ahead of us.

For Kentucky Edition, I'm Clayton Dalton.

Thank you, Clayton.

Only about 5% of the homes damaged during the 2022 flood had flood insurance, according to FEMA.