Good morning. Welcome to Axios today. It's Monday, August 1st. I'm Erica Pandey,

Infernala Boudou. Here's what we're watching today. Democrats could finally deliver on a drug

pricing promise. But first, our one big thing. Kentucky reels from deadly flooding and compounding

natural disasters.

The death toll from severe flooding in Kentucky has risen to at least 26. That includes four

young siblings who were swept away from their parents in the flood waters. Hundreds had to be

evacuated by boat or helicopter and thousands are still without electricity. More rain is expected

today and tomorrow. Many of the communities affected by these floods still haven't fully recovered

from last year's floods and tornadoes in Kentucky. Here to help us make sense of the

Saul is Axios climate reporter Andrew Friedman. Andrew, as a climate reporter, when you see these

breaking stories flash across your screen, which seems to be happening all the time nowadays,

what goes through your mind? It's tough. You know, the thing that really goes through my mind

is that we are seeing a higher tempo of extreme weather events that translate into disasters.

This freak week where we had two 1,000 year rainfall events in the same week, one in St. Louis,

and then the next one in Hazard, Kentucky. Just the impacts in an area like this that has been

hard hit and doesn't have the capacity to cope easily with something like this makes it very hard to see.

One of the most awful parts of this story is that some of these communities were still in

the rebuilding phase from the last years. There was an ice storm, tornadoes, flash floods,

wreaking havoc in Kentucky. What has your reporting told you about this and what can we learn from

Kentucky? I think we're really learning the limits of our resilience to disasters, especially in

certain parts of the country. It really just shows that when you have overlapping weather and

climate extremes with poverty, with communities that are struggling to maintain jobs, to maintain

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