On June 23, 2016, torrential rainfall devastated 12 West Virginia counties. The flash flooding took 23 lives and caused overwhelming destruction. Six years later, recovery efforts continue, with proactive flood mitigation leading the way.
On June 23, 2016, torrential rainfall devastated 12 West Virginia counties. The flash flooding took 23 lives and caused overwhelming destruction. Six years later, recovery efforts continue, with proactive flood mitigation leading the way.
More than 10,000 flood victims registered with FEMA after the 2016 disaster. Several thousand families were not able to rebuild their homes on the limited federal dollars they received.
Jenny Gannaway is executive director of West Virginia’s Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster (VOAD). This association of independent helping agencies works with volunteers, grants and donations.
She explained the challenge for so many families.
“When you only get $33,000 from FEMA, and you need $60,000 to replace your home,” Gannaway said. “We go in and use their $33,000 and use other donated dollars to make sure their home was rebuilt. And we use volunteers which saves a lot of money.”
The RISE West Virginia program, dedicated to 2016 flood recovery, is under VOAD’s administrative umbrella.
Gannaway said VOAD has finished restoring nearly 2400 flood ravaged homes, referring 400 more to the RISE program. She said the last 20 RISE homes on the list should be ready by this fall.
The group worked to not just restore, but relocate numerous homes – even sections of neighborhoods – out of flood zones. She said when families couldn’t or wouldn’t move away from that creek or stream, VOAD rebuilt with flood mitigation top of mind.
“We’d build their home at least two foot above what the actual flood stage was,” Gannaway said. “So if the flood stage was six blocks high, we went two feet higher to give them extra protection.”
More than 120 bridges were destroyed in the 2016 flood. Gannaway says VOAD has fully restored 57 of those bridges. She says all bridge rebuilds are done with stream and flood mitigation construction practices.
“We get culverts out of streams and get in-bank abutments out of streams,” Gannaway said. “We build the bridges from the top of the bank to the top of the other bank so that it’s opening up the streams and it’s not causing a dam to block the stream and flood homes.”
Gannaway said VOAD was down to 50 or so bridges to repair or replace, but she says with all the recent flooding, there are about 100 bridges now on VOAD’s list.
Last year, we spoke with Keith Thompson and his mother Gerda right after the flood. Keith’s dad Edward passed away from complications of hypothermia after being in floodwaters for several hours. Inside Appalachia host Jessica Lilly went back to Rainelle to see how things have changed since the flood. She found that for Keith, the flood was just the beginning of his heartaches in the past year.
Last year, Richwood Middle and High School were damaged beyond repair in historic flooding and the schools moved into temporary spaces for the 2016-’17 school year.
But when the schools moved, the kids didn’t just lose their buildings, they also lost their school-based health center. Now a bureaucratic quagmire may prevent the middle school families from having a center next year.
Richwood Middle has been sharing a building with Cherry River Elementary, a couple miles across town. It worked, mostly, but was crowded. But when the middle school moved in with Cherry River, there wasn’t enough room for their health center to follow.
“Richwood Middle and Richwood High School actually shared a school-based clinic,” middle school principal Gene Collins said. “We were actually one of the first school-based clinics in the state of West Virginia back in the early to mid-90s. For many of my staff, for many of my students, that was their primary care provider.”
School-based health centers are a big deal in places like Richwood because parents don’t always have transportation, time or money to drive their children out of town for care. So if the kids don’t get care at school, they may not get it at all.
According to New River Health, the federally funded health center that ran the clinic, 99 percent of Richwood’s middle and high school students were enrolled in the clinic.
“We have always anticipated that when we get into our temporary modulars that we would have a school-based clinic moving in,” Collins said.
The modular, semi-temporary classrooms that will become Richwood Middle are being built with federal emergency management assistance money at the back of the Cherry River Elementary property.
“And in fact, FEMA has paid for a separate modular for them,” Collins said. “There is a separate clinic building, which was going to be very nice. But now with the federal regulations HRSA will not approve the clinic because they’re saying our address is now Cherry River Elementary, which the scope has been assigned to another provider already.”
The Health Resources and Services Administration, or HRSA, is the federal oversight agency that manages the federally funded health centers.
According to HRSA, New River Health applied for a temporary permit to serve the middle school families. When that permit expired, New River submitted a request to make it permanent, but the paperwork they submitted to HRSA was incomplete.
Then there’s another issue. Cherry River Elementary hadn’t had a school-based health center before the flood, but Camden on Gauley, another FQHC, had been planning on opening one there. When Richwood Middle School moved into Cherry River after the flood, though, the middle school took the space the health center would have used. So, for 2016, neither the elementary nor the middle school had services on site.
But Camden is planning on starting one in the elementary school for next year and has permission from HRSA for those kids. Now that the middle school is right next door, who has the jurisdiction to care for those kids?
“And that’s a complicated process, but basically we have to prove a need in the community for those students in order for HRSA to approve us to go into that location,” John Schultz, Chief Executive Officer of New River Health, said.
“And because there’s another FQHC up in that area, HRSA has to look at what services are they providing and are they maxed out basically or can they continue provide services to additional students.”
Alicia Hamrick is the mother of a seventh-grader at Richwood Middle School. She said for her, the center is much more convenient than driving her daughter 40 minutes to the doctor. For others, it’s a lifeline.
“Lot of the families around here they don’t have vehicles, they don’t have transportation to do that and it needs to come back,” she said.
But unless the health center is able to cut through the red tape, many of those middle school families may not have the care they need.
Appalachia Health News is a project of West Virginia Public Broadcasting, with support from the Benedum Foundation, Charleston Area Medical Center and WVU Medicine.
There is more to recovery than physically rebuilding a house, or a building. Communities are also recovering mentally and emotionally. Dr. Carol Smith is a Professor of Counseling at Marshall University, says finding basic needs like food, clothing, and shelter is just the beginning.
Inside Appalachia co-producer and host Jessica Lilly sat down with Dr. Carol Smith to discuss the year of mental and emotional recovery that West Virginia faced since the flooding of June 2016. Parts of this interview are included in a special TV show, “Inside Appalachia: A Year of Recovery.” You can watch the show Tuesday night at 6:30 p.m. on WVPB or listen on radio.
In the days and weeks after the flood, the words, “West Virginia strong” rang out on signs and across social media. But Dr. Smith says, if you’re having a hard time coping, even to this day, it doesn’t mean you’re weak, it means you’re human.
Rain falling like it would never end has changed the meaning of summer in this tiny corner of Appalachia.
When the downpour finally stopped in White Sulphur Springs on June 23, 2016, five lives had been lost along one road alone — Mill Hill Drive. And 23 people were dead statewide in West Virginia’s worst flooding since 1985.
As the floodwaters receded, a muddy landscape of ruined homes and businesses, wiped-out roads and bridges and devastated lives emerged in hard-hit Greenbrier County. Then there followed an army of volunteers, donors and government workers, rallying to help.
On the anniversary of those rains, a memorial wall, museum and a series of parks linked by sidewalks around Mill Hill Drive will be dedicated Friday on behalf of victims and the community. It’s a place where nearly a dozen businesses have re-opened, and few here are untouched by tragedy.
“It’s a time of celebration and rebirth,” said City Council member Audrey Van Buren, who lost her mother-in-law and sister-in-law in the disaster. “It’s about everyone in our town, and how the volunteers have flocked into town to help us to rebuild. It hasn’t been hundreds. It’s been thousands of people since day one who have poured into the city. We’ve been so blessed.”
Teenager Cameron Zobrist pitched a memorial wall as an Eagle Scout project. It was built with donated material and labor. Now on Mill Hill Drive, a sidewalk leads to a rose garden on the property of Debra Nicely, who lost her husband, daughter and grandson. The bodies of Hershel Nicely, 68; Nataysha Hughes, 33; and Dakota Stone, 16, were found nearby.
Credit Steve Helber / Associated Press
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Associated Press
Lt. Dennis Feazell, of the West Virginia Department of Natural Resources, watches for debris as he and a co-worker search flooded homes in Rainelle, W.Va., Saturday, June 25, 2016.
Further along Mill Hill Drive, a playground honoring 14-year-old victim Mykala Phillips sits beside a garden memorializing Belinda Scott, 54. Scott’s home exploded after a gas leak and she clung to a tree for hours above the floodwaters, dying three days later. The tree is now surrounded by flowers and ornaments depicting her love for butterflies and bees.
“Her name was Belinda,” Van Buren said. “But everybody called her Bee.”
James and Becky Carter Phillips moved their two sons into a new home not far from the one where Mykala was last seen. Their daughter’s body was found weeks later.
With memories still too vivid, James Phillips isn’t interested in revisiting his old neighborhood. His wife likes the idea of the museum and memorial, especially since she wouldn’t have to repeat the story of the flood to curious guests at the Greenbrier, where she works. The luxury resort also saw damage to its golf course, since repaired.
“I get asked so many questions all the time,” she said. “I could direct them right there and they can just look.”
Not long after the floods, ground was broken on Hope Village, a 42-home community for residents whose homes were destroyed.
Belinda Scott’s husband, Ronnie Scott, plans to move in with his dog, Dancer, adopted after the disaster. Debra Nicely was there for the groundbreaking. One of the streets is named Nicely Way.
In February, Nicely shared on Facebook an unknown author’s post about coping with grief by pretending life is fine. Last month, another post hinted at a return to normalcy after she assembled a backyard grill by herself, writing “GO ME!!!”
Elsewhere in Greenbrier County, the town of Rainelle, population 1,500, lost five residents and dozens of homes. And in nearby Kanawha County, where six people died, movement has been slow to patch destruction in two communities including Elkview, where a washed-out bridge made a mall inaccessible. Now the bridge is being replaced and two anchor stores are returning to the mall.
So many low-income homes in Rainelle were abandoned that some worried the community could lose its tax base. But now a Tennessee-based Christian ministry is building at least 50 homes and fixing others.
“The difference the volunteers are making in the lives of the homeowners is a powerful thing,” said Krista Williams of Rainelle, an AmeriCorps VISTA program volunteer, “and it’s creating a movement in this community like we’ve never seen.”
The state’s conservation agency is removing sediment from Rainelle’s flood-control channels. The nearby city of Lewisburg sent a street sweeper to clean Rainelle’s streets, once piled high with debris.
Spunky 70-year-old Mayor Andy Pendleton has dubbed Rainelle “Noah’s Ark” because of the rebuilding, but doesn’t want it to stop just yet.
“There’s so much more to do,” said Pendleton, who walked tearfully through the town’s devastated streets a year ago. “People need jobs. We need to make it ‘Why would people come to Rainelle to visit?’ I want a purpose for Rainelle.”
