State Of Emergency Will Help Mercer County Recover From Hurricane Helene

Like many parts of West Virginia, Mercer County has a plan to handle flooding… but a hurricane wasn’t exactly on the radar. The county is struggling to get the power back on nearly a week after the storm. 

To make things easier, Gov. Jim Justice declared a state of emergency in Mercer County Tuesday night. 

“We were mitigating for the floods. We did not expect the heavy winds to come, and at one given time, I know we were having 30 mile an hour sustained winds with gusts from 65 to 70 [miles an hour],” said Greg Puckett, Mercer County commissioner.

After a long, hot drought, the rains before the storm hit saturated the ground and made it easier for trees to be uprooted.

“We’ve got roofs off. We’ve got trees that have gone through houses, literally, and they are not salvageable. We’ve got [electricity] poles going up the hollers that go probably 20, 30 poles, where it just took them all at one time and snapped them off,” Puckett said.

The level of damage was so unexpected that some of the area’s available emergency crews had left to help storm recovery out of state.

“We’ve got people from Texas, Louisiana. I saw Con Edison trucks working from New York, because a lot of our resources went west when we felt we were going to need to support North Carolina, Tennessee,”  Puckett said. 

By comparison to those areas, he said, “We were blessed.”

Justice echoed that feeling.

“This storm is one that we’ll remember in Appalachia for a long, long time,” Justice said. “We’ve seen some really troubling images from our neighboring states, but there’s no question that Helene has left its mark here at home, as well. We’ll continue to pull the rope together and take care of each other, because that’s what we do in West Virginia.”

Puckett said the governor’s emergency declaration frees up federal resources that will allow the county to get back on its feet as soon as possible.

“This declaration can mean the world for FEMA resources. They can look at the assessed damage, and it puts it higher on the radar, to where the feds can say, ‘Oh, well, we knew about this, and we can assess this damage,’ and in that timeline, we can have greater federal assistance,”  Puckett said.

“We’re having some FEMA representatives come tomorrow and go through it and check the exact damage in a lot of these major areas. Most of them rural and west of Interstate 77 and all the way to the McDowell line.”

Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida as a Category 4 major hurricane on Friday and cut a path of destruction through much of the southeastern United States.