Building Water Resilience Through Action in Harlan County
On Thursday, September 24, 2026, LiKEN Knowledge gathered with Harlan County neighbors and partners for Building Water Resilience Through Action, a participatory tabletop exercise focused on disaster preparedness.
Why We Convened
The exercise was part of our Water Pressure Project, Blessed and Stressed by Water in Our Hollers, LiKEN’s multi-year effort to support community-led water resilience in Central Appalachia. Through the Water Pressure project, our Water Collaboratory has worked alongside residents, water operators, local officials, organizers, and regional and national partners to strengthen the resilience of water systems, lift up local knowledge, and build practical tools that communities can use before, during, and after water emergencies.
The Pacific Institute is one of our key partners in this work through the Water and Climate Equity Project. As Dr. Shannon McNeeley of the Pacific Institute explained after the exercise:
“Our overarching goal with the Water and Climate Equity Project is to work with rural communities to share knowledge and co-create strategies for resilience in responding to water-related disasters. Like here, flooding obviously is a big one. We’re experiencing it in real time. People were pulled away from the workshop to deal with some of the emergencies related to that. So this type of real-world, hands-on experience and knowledge-sharing event is super important to helping communities build resilience to prepare and respond to disasters.”
That is the heart of why we convened this tabletop exercise. Disaster preparedness can sound abstract until people sit together and talk through what actually happens when the water rises: who has information, who needs it, who can move people, who can communicate publicly, who knows the roads, who knows the water systems, who can open shelter space, who has backup supplies, and who may be missing from the room.
Practicing Together
A tabletop exercise gives people a structured way to practice those questions before the next emergency demands answers and action. In the exercise, participants respond from the roles they already hold in the community. They do not need to pretend to be someone else. Fire departments bring what fire departments know. Water operators bring what water operators know. Health-care facilities bring what health-care facilities know. Emergency management, radio, local government, Red Cross, County Cooperative Extension, state partners, and community organizations each bring another part of the picture.
In Harlan County, that practice felt especially immediate. Michelle Carroll-Cole, LiKEN Knowledge’s Community Engagement Coordinator in Harlan County, described the exercise as it was unfolding:
“We are here today doing a disaster resilience tabletop exercise around a flooding scenario. We have brought together stakeholders from throughout the community with emergency management, firemen, nursing homes, just all kind of stakeholders here, water plant operators, state representatives. And unfortunately, during this time, we are actually experiencing a disaster. We’re experiencing flooding in Harlan County. So this tabletop exercise has come at a very curious moment.”
That moment made visible something Harlan County already knows well: water emergencies do not stay in one lane. Flooding can affect roads and bridges, hospitals and nursing homes, water plants and distribution lines, shelters and communications, public safety, and household safety all at once. A plan on paper matters, but to turn it into action, so do relationships, memory, trust, and the lived knowledge of people who know the hollers, the systems, the weather, and one another.
The exercise used a flooding scenario based on the 2025 flood and then introduced complications: floodgates that would not close, residents needing rescue, water-system disruptions, questions about public information, and other moments where one agency or organization could not answer alone. The goal was to make space for shared problem-solving.
As Deborah Thompson, LiKEN’s Impact Director and co-director of the Water Collaboratory, reflected:
“It made them think a little more about what they would do in a situation. They had to think on their feet. They had to talk to other people in the community and try to figure out how to make this work. A lot of people relied on their emergency procedures that they have in their organizations, and I think some of them said that they needed to go back and review them.”
That is a successful outcome. When people leave with a clearer sense of who to call, what they can offer, what they need to review, and who else should be included next time, the community is already stronger than it was before.
What We Learned
Dr. McNeeley saw the same strength in the room:
“I thought it was an excellent turnout and a really good, diverse group of people who all have an important stake in emergency preparedness and response. You had firefighters, you had police officers, you had elected officials, you had healthcare workers, you had water folks. It really ran the gamut of all of the different community stakeholders, and everyone really engaged in the exercise. I thought there was a lot of great input, a lot of sharing of information and knowledge and resources, so I thought it was a successful event.”
For LiKEN, that sharing of knowledge and resources is not a side benefit. It is the work. Our approach begins from the belief that communities already hold essential knowledge about their own resilience. Outside partners can bring tools, facilitation, research, and support, but the deepest understanding of a place lives with the people who live and work there.
That came through clearly in what local participants took from the evening. Steven Hatfield, Chief of Sunshine Fire Department, emphasized the value of working with people he would not normally get to train with:
“It was a real good exercise. We got to actually work with people that we don’t normally get to interact with during incidents. We had a whole lot more people than I’ve ever been able to train with. It gave us a new perspective on maybe bringing in more entities to work with there that we would have not thought of out of the box.”
Jeremy Williams, Harlan County’s County Extension Agent for Agriculture and Natural Resources, named a similar lesson:
“The interaction of folks that you wouldn’t get to interact with, the knowledge base, getting the information, receiving the information here tonight from entities that I wouldn’t have thought of that they could add to the situation. They’re another tool in the toolbox, so to speak.”
This Harlan tabletop exercise builds on LiKEN’s earlier learning with tabletop exercises. Through the Water and Climate Equity Project, our team has learned from trainings and practice sessions with partners, including Rural Community Assistance Partnership. We have tested tabletop approaches at the Appalachian Studies Association and in Martin County, where smaller gatherings led to honest conversations about preparedness, community capacity, and the possibility of creating resilience hubs. Each experience has helped us better understand how to create spaces where people can learn from one another rather than simply receive information.
The Harlan exercise reminded us that preparedness is not a one-time checklist. It is a relationship-building process. It asks us to keep coming back to the same practical questions with humility: Who is here? Who is missing? What do we know? What do we need to know? What can we do together that none of us can do alone?
We are grateful to everyone who came out on a rainy Thursday evening, shared their experiences, and helped think through how Harlan County can continue building water resilience from the ground up. LiKEN will prepare a brief report from the exercise and share it with attendees, including lessons learned and a summary of what different offices and organizations do during emergencies.
Our hope is that the conversation keeps moving: more shared knowledge, stronger relationships, clearer roles, and more resilient communities rooted in the people who know Harlan County best.
Comments