Breathitt County

Uh, y-you know, at face value, Beshear, uh, you know, does not have the stereotypical, you know, poor Appalachian story, and he would say that Vance doesn't either, that Vance was born in Ohio, and he's not really from Appalachia.

Of course, uh, Vance has roots in Breathitt County.

And, and so, uh, Megan, I, I really wanted to stress this.

Let's play a clip from the interview.

gone to trial yet? So the first trial was set to begin in, was it August? And they also settled.

This was a school district in rural Kentucky called Breathitt County.

And they were going to be the leader in the school district trials.

And they ended up settling.

More than $10 million is on the way to some eastern Kentucky communities and a state park.

Governor Andy Beshear says FEMA has approved reimbursements to the Kentucky Division of Emergency Management and Fort Boonesboro, as well as Breathitt, Carroll, and Owsley counties.

These dollars were obligated to Kentucky through disaster declarations following the Eastern Kentucky floods in 2022 and flooding in February and April of 2025.

Most of the money is coming from FEMA's Public Assistance Program, which provides grants to governments and private nonprofits for debris removal and infrastructure repairs.

In the mountains of Appalachia, battery radios weighed up to 50 pounds, and the batteries required regular trips down the mountain to recharge.

A guy named Mike Maloney, who grew up in Breathitt County, Kentucky, remembered it like this.

We lived so far away from other people, at times you couldn't even see the smoke from other chimneys, but we had a battery-powered radio.

I remember how hard it was to carry that battery up to the mountaintop.