A bridge that was washed out in flooding last year is being replaced at a mall in West Virginia, and almost all of the businesses are expected to reopen.
The Charleston Gazette-Mail reports representatives of the businesses and rent documents from Crossings Mall owner Tara Retail Group indicate 23 of the 26 businesses open at the Elkview mall when the June 23, 2016, flood occurred are expected to reopen.
The new bridge is expected to be ready to cross in July.
The bridge connected hundreds of West Virginia residents to their workplace, but bankruptcy sparked legal battles and delayed the repairs until a federal bankruptcy judge approved a bridge financing plan.
Kanawha County Commission President Kent Carper says the return of most of the businesses shows the community’s resiliency.
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.
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.”
Cleanup work has started on flood-control channels in the West Virginia community of Rainelle, which was ravaged by flooding last June.
The West Virginia Conservation Agency says in a news release that the agency and its contractors are removing sediment from channel beds and clearing brush from the channel banks. The West Virginia National Guard will take the debris to another site for incineration.
The channels were built between 1959 and 1961 by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and have had little maintenance since.
Once restored, the channels will be better suited to handle floodwaters and divert them from homes and businesses
Flood-affected communities in southern West Virginia are receiving federal aid to help clean up brownfield sites for future development.
A brownfield is a site environmental officials have deemed hazardous for residential and other construction because it previously housed some kind of commercial or industrial development that could have resulted in contamination.
The West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection announced Wednesday it received a $300,000 grant to clean up these types of sites in Rupert and Rainelle in Greenbrier County that were affected by the June 2016 floods.
According to a press release, the DEP plans to use the money to clean up sites that could potentially house businesses, schools and homes as the communities work toward long-term revitalization.
The $300,000 grant was part of a larger $1.6 million federal Environmental Protection Agency award to West Virginia. Other brownfield sites that will be mitigated with the award include areas of Wood, Upshur, Brooke and Hancock counties.
The June 2016 flood killed 23 people in the state and resulted in a federal disaster declaration in about a dozen counties.
“I know it was raining hard when I got off the interstate.”
Richard Wolfe said he doesn’t remember a lot about the evening of June 23, 2016. He was visiting his sister in Charleston when he decided to heard toward his home of more than 70 years on Koontz Street in Clendenin during a severe storm that would result in historic levels of flooding for the community.
“When I got off the interstate, the water was covering over the park and ride and I turned around and went back to Charleston,” he said. “I knew I couldn’t get into Clendenin.”
That was on Thursday. It was Sunday before Wolfe was able to return to his home where he said everything in the house was turned over.
He remembered a utility trailer had floated into the upstream side of his home and a small camping trailer into the downstream side, trailers he’d never seen before, and there was “mud everywhere.”
Wolfe, who has been living with his sister for the past year, will soon be back in his Clendenin home, but it won’t be the same house he lived in for seven decades.
Nearly a year after the devastatingly high waters covered his home in mud and debris, a crew of 6 Mennonite men have started to build a new house in the same place his home once stood.
The men were laying row after row of concrete block for the new house’s foundation on Tuesday afternoon, scraping the excess mortar squeezed from the seams between each one, as Wolfe watched from a front porch across the street.
Orie Lahman brought the small group from Indiana to Clendenin on Monday and by Tuesday, they had almost completed the foundation. Lahman said once that’s done, his crew will return to Indiana and another group will take over Wolfe’s construction.
Then in a few weeks, Lahman will return with a larger group to start on another house down the street.
“We like to bring in about 20 people, young people and adults, and work and try to build the whole house in a little more than a week maybe,” he said.
Lahman said it won’t be move-in ready after a week, but his team of Mennonite disaster volunteers can take it from a bare foundation to a home with hung drywall in that time.
Credit Ashton Marra / West Virginia Public Broadcasting
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West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Richard Wolfe looks on as a group of Mennonite volunteers rebuild his home across the street from this porch on Koontz St. in Clendenin.
Wolfe’s home is one of ten being rebuilt in the community of around 1,200 people 20 minutes north of Charleston.
Funding for the homes has come partially from awards from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, but largely from nonprofit organizations like Greenbrier County’s Neighbors Loving Neighbors, the United Way of Central West Virginia, and the West Virginia Rotary Club, all organized under the West Virginia Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster, or VOAD.
Jenny Gannaway, VOAD’s president and executive director, said it’s the coordination of efforts that’s making the rebuilding process possible.
“One person cannot do it all, it takes everybody I may have the funding that I can put on the table, but without someone an organization doing the case management or another organization to build the home, then my funding is not going to to as far,” she said.
“So, by all of us coming together and working together, we are able to stretch our dollars and accomplish a lot more.”
Gannaway and representatives of the other voluntary agencies involved in funding the homes broke ground on the project in front of Wolfe’s property Tuesday.
Gannaway said VOAD has identified four families, including Wolfe, to take the new homes and is working to find the additional six.
