‘I won’t give up.’ Husband of Kentucky woman missing in flood continues search for her

Vanessa Baker is out there, somewhere, and her husband won’t be at peace until he finds her.

He knows she’s dead. He saw her washed away by the muddy onslaught of water that hit their home in Breathitt County July 28, 2022, despite her cousin’s desperate effort to hang on to her.

But of the 45 people the state says died as a result of catastrophic flooding that hit Eastern Kentucky in July 2022, Baker is the only one who hasn’t been found.

“I know she is dead in my mind but in my heart she ain’t. She never will be,” said her husband, Farmer Edward Baker. “In your heart you don’t want to accept it. There’s still that little dredge of hope.”

Ed and Vanessa Baker had been married nearly 40 years at the time of the flood. They had raised two sons, Michael and Brandon, and had two grandchildren.

He worked maintaining equipment at surface coal mines earlier in their marriage and then drove a school bus, but has been disabled since being seriously hurt in a car wreck in 1997.

He uses a wheelchair but can walk with the help of a cane.

His wife, who was 60, spent a good deal of time caring for him, Baker said.

“She was everything to me,” he said.

His wife was a religious woman who never had an unkind word for anyone, said Baker, a soft-spoken man of 62.

Vanessa Baker had worked for 27 years at the Marie Roberts-Caney Elementary school, a rural school with about 220 students in grades pre-kindergarten through 6.

She was the secretary, attendance clerk and finance officer, said principal Jason Fugate.

Fugate said Baker was kindhearted and patient. He wondered sometimes why she never got aggravated over anything.

“She was the type of person that would do anything for anybody,” Fugate said.

Baker said floodwater had never gotten into the doublewide mobile home overlooking River Caney where he and his wife had lived since November 1982, but she was scared of high water, so he was keeping an eye on the creek as it rose late on July 27.

Baker and others said the creek seemed to surge not long after midnight.

“It come all at once,” he said.

More than 100 residents of the River Caney community have sued two coal companies, Blackhawk Mining and Pine Branch Coal, alleging silt ponds at a surface mine in the hills above the community failed because the companies had not properly maintained them, sending “excessive water” down the valley.

A silt pond is designed to hold water draining from a surface mine so that sediment can settle out of it and not wash into creeks. It can lose capacity to hold water if not cleaned out periodically.

D. Scott Simonton, an engineer who studied the flooding for those suing the companies, said reclamation at the mine in hills above Caney Creek, also called River Caney, was “wholly inadequate,” with large areas having little or no vegetation to slow runoff.

It also appeared that one key silt pond hadn’t been cleaned out, leaving it with reduced capacity to hold water, Simonton said.

The failure to properly reclaim the mine resulted in an increase in peak stormwater runoff, which “significantly increased the destructive force of the flood water,” Simonton said in his report.

In response to the claims in the lawsuit, the coal companies have argued they did nothing to cause or contribute to the flooding and are not responsible for the damage it caused.

No acts or omissions by the companies “exacerbated or worsened any claimed damages” by residents, the companies said.

Baker said when the water surrounded his home, he heard his son Michael, who lived next door, yelling for them to get out. His son was standing outside in the water but couldn’t get to them, Baker said.

“I looked at her and said, ‘Old woman, it’s time to go,’“ Baker said.

Baker was in a wheelchair as he followed his wife down the ramp off their front porch.

It was dark, but the porch light was on and lightning was flashing, so he could see, Baker said.

Freddie Wayne Mullins, who is married to Baker’s sister and is his wife’s cousin, was waiting at the bottom of the ramp to help, fighting to keep his footing in water over his waist.

Their son tried to come help as well, but the current knocked him down several times, Baker said.

The last thing he heard his wife say was that she couldn’t swim.

Mullins took Vanessa Baker by the hand, but the water swept both of them away and Mullins lost his grip on her. Then the porch broke loose from the house, throwing him in the detached garage, Baker said.

He was in water up to his neck and the garage was breaking apart.

“I said, ‘Lord, if you’re gonna take me, take me,’“ he said.

But after two or three hours, Baker was able to crawl to higher ground. He spent several days in the hospital with pneumonia.

He’s been tormented by his wife’s disappearance.

He wonders what more he could have done that night and feels some guilt, questioning if waiting on him kept her from making it.

“It just bears on me that it was my fault,” he said.

He gets emotional talking about her, and his mind replays the scene of her being carried away over and over.

“I get up every morning and pray and before I lay down at night,” Baker said. “It’s just heartbreaking that I can’t find her or any part of her.”

Baker has created a memorial to his wife at their old home site, but feels bad he hasn’t been able to make good on his promise to bury her by her mother, which is what she wanted.

Baker paid more than $40,000 for a John Deere excavator to look for his wife. It’s a machine with hard rubber treads and an arm on the front with a bucket to scoop up dirt and debris.

He has used it to dig along the river, taking his sons with him to check what he digs up.

Mud and debris left by the flood complicates the search.

“We could be walking right over top of her and never know it,” Baker said.

Volunteers have continued searching some weekends for Vanessa Baker’s body as well, combing the riverbanks on foot and using drones and dogs.

“We’d like to bring that family some closure,” said Breathitt County Coroner Hargis Epperson.

Members of Wolfe County Search and Rescue searched on a recent weekend, Epperson said.

They found bones at three locations, but two sets were not human and the third set likely is not human as well, Epperson said.

Epperson has had previous bones found by searchers analyzed a number of times, but all turned out to be animals.

The river rose for several hours after Vanessa Baker disappeared, meaning her body could have been carried many miles downstream, the coroner said.

River Caney runs into the North Fork of the Kentucky River about half a mile past where the Bakers lived.

Baker said he’ll look for his wife as long as he is able.

“I’ve searched and searched and searched,” Baker said. “I won’t give up until she’s found or I die.”