Gibson began a Wednesday presentation by noting that the growing frequency of Kentucky's disasters isn't limited to the last few years. He said the trend is visible as far back as 2010.
"Kentucky has 33 declared events in the same time as Florida had 31 and Tennessee had 29. And you can bring that forward to the 2020 and just look back over a five-year period, and that doesn't change," he said. "It's not just in the past few years things have dramatically changed. It's been a trend. The difference is the expense and the magnitude of the disasters."
And in that same period, the financial impact has also ballooned. The emergency director went on to say between 2010 and 2020, the state lost the equivalent of roughly $350 million dollars' worth of public assistance projects —a sizable number, but nowhere near the $2 billion the state has lost so far this decade in just half the amount of time.
And it's a trajectory that's continued this year with the commonwealth receiving three federal disaster declarations and requesting four since January.