MAYFIELD, Ky. — Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear arrived in Mayfield on Friday and meeting with people who were affected by the weather in order to further plan on how to handle the damage.

Beshear stated that no fatal catastrophe resulted from the flood. 

“I am pleased that all reports and indications are that we have not lost a single Kentuckian and that everybody is accounted for,” Beshear said.

Beshear says the affected areas will remain in a state of emergency, despite not being ordered to do so by local authorities.

“As of right now, we are still under a state declaration of emergency,” Beshear said. “What that does is unlock state assistance and state funding as it is needed. We had zero request for state assistance for the immediate aftermath, that means our local responders, city and county governments did a tremendous job at handling at.”

Beshear also addressed the parents who might fear for their children who attend Mayfield Elementary School, which was one of the infrastructures affected by the flood.

“What we saw here is more than once-in-a-generation,” Beshear said. “This one is an outlier.”

“Nevertheless, our job is always we make sure we are building infrastructure that is more resilient, able to handle anything that comes our way. We’ve put about $500 million in grant into our water and sewer budgets. That means, in this upcoming budget, we need more of those dollars to make sure we can replace aging infrastructure with new, resilient infrastructure, ready to handle whatever Mother Nature throws at us.”

Besides repairs, hopefulness and clean up, Beshear has also stated power outages cause by the flood have gone down.

“We are down to only 246 power outages, that is down from a high of 19,433, so thanks to all of our utility companies for how hard and how fast they worked,” Beshear said.

But the results speak for themselves: Kentuckians are resilient.

“It’s hard to not feel like we’ve been punched in the gut for this town and this area to be hit again,” Beshear said. “But I can tell you one thing: the people of western Kentucky are tough, and after the last year and a half, absolutely know how to lift themselves up and rebuild.”