Legal aid attorney Whitney Bailey sees how the devastating memories of the fatal flooding in eastern Kentucky in 2022 still affect her clients.

She knows to expect canceled appointments when it rains.

"They will almost always call to reschedule," said Bailey, a disaster response attorney with AppalReD Legal Aid.

It's a sign of the trauma that remains two years after flooding caused by record rainfall destroyed or damaged thousands of homes and killed 45 people.

In addition to the emotional impact, the civil legal problems that arise from natural disasters can take years to resolve. Many of Bailey's clients are still working through issues related to housing, government benefits and their finances.

She and other legal aid attorneys predict the need for their services will only increase as the number and cost of natural disasters increase amid climate change. Nonprofit legal organizations that serve low-income clients told Law360 they project increased demand for help related to natural disasters such as flooding, tornadoes, hurricanes and wildfires. Lawyers are also seeing legal issues arise from extreme heat.

In Kentucky, Christin Gibson's family was devastated from the loss of her mother-in-law, who was killed in the flooding.

"Two years later, I'm still suffering from it," said Gibson, a 28-year-old mother of two who now works in retail customer service.

Bailey has helped Gibson navigate several legal issues, including a Federal Emergency Management Agency appeal for a car that was destroyed. The attorney also connected Gibson with aid to replace the septic system in her home.

"AppalReD has been such a blessing to me," Gibson said.


With experts predicting increased frequency and severity of major weather events, "more and more people will need to navigate the recovery process," said Jeanne Ortiz-Ortiz, a vice director of the American Bar Association Young Lawyers Division's Disaster Legal Services program, adding that "we need to be really proactive about promoting and advocating for a culture of disaster preparedness as the climate continues to change."

According to the U.S. government's latest National Climate Assessment, "the number and cost of weather-related disasters have increased dramatically over the past four decades." This is due to the increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, as well as factors such as population growth, development in hazard-prone areas and rising property values.

"In the 1980s, the country experienced, on average, one (inflation-adjusted) billion-dollar disaster every four months," the multiagency report released last November, states. "Now, there is one every three weeks, on average."

The assessment also notes that low-income communities, people of color and Indigenous populations "experience high exposure and vulnerability to extreme events due to both their proximity to hazard-prone areas and lack of adequate infrastructure or disaster management resources."

The ABA program, which dates to the 1970s and is a partnership with FEMA, provides free legal help to disaster survivors. Volunteer lawyers help people navigate issues such as insurance claims, FEMA appeals, contractor fraud and landlord disputes.

In recent years, the number of events the Disaster Legal Services program responds to has increased annually. So far this year, lawyers with the program have already helped survivors with issues related to 30 new disaster declarations, according to Amanda Brown, the program director. That's up from 19 in 2023, 12 in 2022 and 16 in 2021.

Program leaders expect even more disaster declarations this year as Hurricane Helene brings life-threatening weather to Florida and across the Southeast.

At Iowa Legal Aid, lawyers have been helping residents deal with a string of natural disasters this year, including a record number of tornadoes.

Earlier this year, the organization rolled out its "justice bus," a mobile legal clinic that travels to rural and underserved areas of the state. Staff have used the bus to respond to events such as record flooding in northwest Iowa, which in June damaged at least 1,900 properties, with hundreds destroyed.


The idea is to bring services to those who might not be able to get to a legal office, said Josh Gaul, managing attorney with Iowa Legal Aid. The bus also provides a safe, climate-controlled meeting place if a community's power is out after a disaster.

The National Weather Service reported in mid-August that Iowa had seen 122 tornadoes so far in 2024, breaking a previous record set two decades earlier of 120 tornadoes. However, the agency noted that direct annual comparisons are difficult and several factors have contributed to a higher count in recent years, including "better communication and recording devices, social media, a more active storm spotting and chasing network, and better radar technology."

Natural disasters are also "a poverty issue," Gaul said, "because low-income individuals are disproportionately affected." They might have inadequate insurance, or live in substandard housing more likely to be destroyed by extreme weather, or lack paid time off to deal with putting the pieces back together after a disaster, for example.

At Legal Services Corp., the independent nonprofit established by Congress that funds legal aid organizations around the country, officials told Law360 they've seen a deepening understanding of the role of civil legal aid in the process of disaster recovery. LSC set up its disaster task force in 2018 to examine ways to improve the delivery of legal services to low-income natural disaster survivors. 

"Congress members are actively reaching out to us, asking, 'How can we help?'" said LSC disaster grants program counsel Shrushti Kothari, who is also a vice director of the ABA's Disaster Legal Services program. "And I feel like that has been the result of continuous education, continuous results that have been provided by all of our grantees and LSC itself."

Extreme heat can also play a role in low-income people's legal needs. For instance, disputes can arise when a landlord does not fix a broken or deficient air conditioner or improperly shuts off someone's utilities, said Katelin Norris, a housing attorney at Texas RioGrande Legal Aid.

She noted that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in June announced a new policy aimed at helping residents of public housing afford air conditioning during times of extreme heat by letting local public housing agencies offer more aid to cover utilities. People who live in subsidized housing can be especially vulnerable to heat-related dangers, as many are older, children or have a disability, she added.

In Virginia, staff with the Legal Aid Justice Center worked with the Agricultural Workers Advocacy Coalition this summer to raise money for more than 40 air conditioning units that were delivered to migrant farmworker camps on the state's Eastern Shore. Manuel Gago, a program director with the center's Worker Justice Program, said he'd heard stories of people opening their refrigerator to get some cold air, or sleeping with frozen water bottles in their pillows.

The center's staff has advocated for agricultural workers on a variety of issues related to housing and the workplace.

Clients in "Survival Mode"

Growing up in the Pocono Mountains, Charlie Burrows didn't think of Pennsylvania as a place where people needed to worry about natural disasters. But now, as the regional disaster relief attorney at Legal Aid of Southeastern Pennsylvania, his job is to help Pennsylvanians affected by Hurricane Ida, which brought historic flooding to the state.

Together with Gaul of Iowa Legal Aid, Burrows published an article earlier this year in The MIE Journal, which focuses on civil legal aid issues, about the increased need for legal organizations to build the capacity to respond to natural disasters. The article noted that disaster-related legal services were not previously an emphasis for LASP, but today, Burrows focuses on it full-time.

Issues related to housing, bankruptcy and consumer credit are among those he sees people dealing with three years after the storm, Burrows said.

Legal issues can frequently fall to the bottom of someone's priority list when they go into "survival mode" — or if they don't even realize they have a legal problem, he noted.

"A hurricane hits your town and your house is mostly destroyed. You're worried about where you're going to be staying, is your kid's school going to be open, where are you getting food from for the week," he said.

People are also often facing immense loss in the wake of a disaster. They might have lost their home or loved ones.

Attorney Brittanny Perrigue Gomez, the disaster benefits team manager at Texas RioGrande Legal Aid, said that in the first few weeks after a disaster, gathering information and documents from clients "can often be a little tenuous, because they're just still trying to keep their life together after what's happened" while she tries to meet legal deadlines.

"And I know that my role in this is the last thing on their minds, which is totally understandable," she said.

Gibson, the AppalReD client in Kentucky, was early in pregnancy with her second child and had a broken leg when she escaped her home during the flooding. She recalled how difficult it was to process information after the disaster when she went to a local community center to hear from FEMA representatives.

"They're taking information from everybody, and you can hear everybody's stories where you're talking about your story," she said.

Bailey, Gibson's attorney at AppalReD, said she was originally hired for a different role at the organization, but was asked to help with FEMA appeals in light of the community's needs after the flooding.


Two years later, she directs its Disaster Response Project and has worked with hundreds of low-income survivors.

Bailey said it's gratifying when clients have positive outcomes with their cases, though it's also difficult to see how the flooding changed so many people's lives.

"People are still really, really frustrated and worn out," she said.

Due to high demand, AppalRED recently added another disaster response attorney to help meet client needs, and Bailey predicts that communities around the nation will see increased need for disaster-related legal services.

"Climate change is real, and it is happening whether we want to accept it or not," she said.

--Editing by Alanna Weissman.

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