Willa Johnson knew it was time to go when she noticed a pair of her shoes floating by the stairs.

For hours, she had listened as massive storms and relentless rains battered McRoberts, Kentucky. A native of Appalachia, she had lived through floods before, but shed never seen rising water overtake the road right outside her home. Now it was in her house.

Johnson rode out the storm at her parents place up the hill, where mudslides posed a risk but at least the water couldnt reach. The next afternoon, when cellular service finally returned, she began to understand the havoc that the storms had unleashed.

Places like McRoberts and Whitesburg, a small mountain town bisected by the trickling North Fork of the Kentucky River, were submerged beneath what the National Weather Service would ultimately deem a 1,000-year flood. News alerts said that multiple people were killed and that death tolls would surely rise.

Johnsons home, like many others in the area, was gone. And unbeknownst to her, some of Johnsons friends and family members had begun to wonder if she was among the missing.

But it wasnt until she found out that Appalshop a beloved media and community center in the heart of Whitesburg had flooded, too, that Johnson broke down.

Ive cried more over Appalshop than I did losing a lot of my own possessions, Johnson, who directs the centers renowned film program, told HuffPost.

Launched in 1969 amid President Lyndon B. Johnsons so-called War on Poverty, Appalshop has spent a half-century reclaiming and reframing Appalachia as more than the impoverished, woebegone region that dominates the popular perception.

Originally a film workshop, it is now a full-fledged producer, collector and preservationist of Appalachian culture and art that prides itself on its ability to both celebrate and critique mountain society. Appalshop hosts a film school, a radio station, photography workshops, a theater, a literary magazine and a record label, and it is also home to numerous community development initiatives. Its work has been screened at the Sundance Film Festival, South by Southwest, the Museum of Modern Art and the Smithsonian Institution.

In a region where its easy to feel like youre not seen sometimes, Johnson said, Appalshop is a celebration of what it means to be here. It is a celebration of being able to bring people together with different belief systems and different ideologies, and still be Appalachian together. It is, at the root, this celebration of what it means to be from this region.

Having it underwater, she said, hurt.

The founding mission of Appalshop was to educate and empower people from the mountains to tell their own stories, with the sort of complexity and nuance that mainstream narratives tend to flatten into a singular hillbilly stereotype.

Drowned beneath the swollen Kentucky River, with its repository of historic films and other artifacts at risk of total ruin, Appalshops iconic wooden building now had another story to tell about how lives and livelihoods, buildings and homes are not all thats under threat from increasingly dangerous storms brought about by the climate crisis.

So, too, are entire cultures and communities, and places like Appalshop that bind them together.

A Natural Disaster Aided By The Hands Of Mankind

Mountain towns such as Whitesburg are used to floods.

Whenever it rains for many days, we start thinking about flooding, said Mimi Pickering, an award-winning videographer who has worked at Appalshop since 1971. You go out, and youre kind of looking at the river to see where it is.

But Julys disaster was unprecedented and unfathomable. Two days of steady rain had already soaked the ground when a massive storm system rolled through on the night of July 27. Over the next 48 hours, it dumped between 8.5 and 10 inches of rain onto the region, overwhelming everything below.

The North Fork of the Kentucky River is more of a creek on most days, its depths measurable in inches. When it finally crested amid the floods, the river was up more than 20 feet at least 6 feet higher than its previous record level.

The disaster killed 39 people, making it likely the deadliest flood in Kentuckys history.

What happened here is just totally off of the scale of what anybody imagined was possible, said Marley Green, Appalshops director of community development. Even if you were here in 1957 and experienced the last record flood, this is 50% bigger than that.