The town of Dante sits where the forks of Lick Creek come together. The coal mining town has had floods throughout its history. Climate change is causing more extreme rainfall, and Dante is one of many places in Southwest Virginia with worsening flooding. According to a 2022 paper in Nature Communications Earth and Environment, if carbon emissions remain high, flash flood frequency could almost double in Appalachia by the end of the century.
On a sunny spring Sunday, James Mabry stands in his church at the bottom of the road where he grew up. When his brother became the pastor in 1981, their dad helped build the brick sanctuary with white doors on the front and red stained-glass crosses in the windows. The railroad runs next to the church, so close that trains shake the windows when they pass.
On the other side is the left fork of Lick Creek. During a sudden thunderstorm on July 18 last year, that lively creek rose to waist high where the road curves right outside the church. James was there.
"I lost my vehicle in the flood. Right out there on that curve," James recounts.
His 100-year-old mother, Lillie, was in the car with him.
"I got the windows down and I couldn't open the door. I'm glad they didn't open because the water would have rushed in," he remembers." I asked mama, 'Can you crawl out the back, get out the window?' And she come out back with her head first. And I just got her in my arms because she weighed about 70 pounds probably, and I carried her about a hundred yards down the track to the church."
During peak coal production in the 1920s, Dante was a multicultural community boasting Russell County’s largest population of several thousand. A few hundred people remain today. Back then, the coal company segregated housing for the coal miners. James is 77 and grew up in Sawmill Hollow, where African American coal miners were housed.
"Until we got to be 15 or 20, you know, we didn't hardly cross that track," James remembers.
Between the dozen or so houses along Sawmill Hollow are empty lots where neighbors used to live. At the top of the hill is a campground where the Black school James attended before integration once stood. On his way up the hill, James stops at his childhood home. Lillie, who is now 101, sits at her kitchen table in the house where she grew up and then raised her seven kids. I ask if she ever saw the water get that high.
"Yes," she responds.
"What are some of the things you remember about flooding," I ask?
"Just water."
"Mama used to be the main one to clean it up," James adds.
Aid groups helped the Mabrys clean up the mud in the house this time. Lick Creek runs behind their house. James points to an overgrown, muddy bank.
"When I was younger, that was our playground. It just washed the bank away," James remembers.
A lot washes away in each flood. What’s left is this tight-knit community.
Amanda Hall, the community builder at the University of Virginia at Wise, helps people respond to increasing flooding through a program called the Resilience Adaptation Feasibility Tool, or RAFT for short. RAFT started working with flood-prone communities on Virginia’s coast and recently expanded to Southwest Virginia.
"We hold a series of community conversations," Hall explains. "What are you seeing in your backyard? What ideas do you have for solutions?"
The RAFT team is working with Dante’s neighbors in Dickenson County, which also has a history of flash flooding and coal mining. There, the town of Haysi has been hammered with floods in recent years, with a particularly bad one in February last year.
"Our communities here rally together, but it's still exhausting for folks to constantly be starting over, and now almost annually, according to Hall.
The program is federally funded and free for participating local governments. Hall and her team help residents consider their potential responses to flood risks. Then, the community votes on their priorities. One of Dickenson County’s priorities is studying how to expand a community kitchen. They also formed an advisory committee to help the board of supervisors with energy economy decisions.
Hall knows that each Appalachian community should decide what they want to do about increasing floods.
"It is amazing how many towns are 100% in a flood zone. It's very easy for someone looking at flood maps to say this is where it floods, but it's a very different narrative when you're talking to someone who's lived in a floodplain for five generations."
As James walks along Lick Creek next to his church, he points out where the bank is falling into the creek, just feet from the church’s foundation.
"The next flood is going to keep on washing away more and more dirt, until it’s in the church," he predicts.
James thinks a flood wall could protect the church—which is now the only Black church in town.
That Sunday morning, the small congregation of First Mount Calvary Baptist Church prays together. There are no easy answers for flood-prone places, but this community’s love for their neighbors will be essential to weathering the coming storms.
This story is a collaboration with Climate Central and was supported by the Pulitzer Center.