Hackney is accused of lying to two disaster relief agencies to obtain aid after claiming her Cabin Creek home was damaged in floods late last month.
An arrest warrant has been issued for a woman accused of defrauding two West Virginia disaster relief agencies after last month’s floods in eastern Kanawha County.
The Kanawha County Sheriff’s office is searching for 26-year-old Brittany Lee Hackney of Sissonville.
Hackney is accused of lying to two disaster relief agencies to obtain aid after claiming her Cabin Creek home was damaged in floods late last month.
“These are our people, we have to help.” WVPB speaks with community members affected by recent flooding in Kanawha County. The communities around Slaughter, Witcher, Fields, Kelly and Horse Mill Creek had six to nine inches of precipitation through Monday morning.
The National Weather Service received its first call about the flooding at 6:45 a.m. Monday after rain blanketed eastern Kanawha County through the weekend.
The storm intensified early Monday, by which point the soil was saturated and water was running off the mountain. The communities around Slaughter, Witcher, Fields, Kelly and Horse Mill Creek had six to nine inches of precipitation through Monday morning.
As the water moved down the hills and into creeks beds, it brought debris with it. The more water, the more debris.
Eventually those waterways backed up, and when the water had nowhere else to go, it went into people’s homes, cars, farms and gardens.
Ray Lyons’ home is off Kelly Creek in Mammoth, the location that saw the most rain during the storm Monday. Flood waters came within five feet of his house and flooded his acre-wide vegetable and fruit garden.
“It just came up so fast. Within two hours — and it just kept coming,” Lyons said.
He said during the rain he worked to keep debris, like logs and large mud deposits, out of the road in front of his house so that cars could get through — and escape the flooding.
Eventually the road became too deep with water to pass.
“A lot of people couldn’t get through, and that, oh, that was terrible,” he said.
After the flood, Lyon and his cousin worked with an excavator to dig debris out of the creek to help drain water off the land.
“State [crews] didn’t come up. But you know, I can take care of it, I have lived up this holler my whole life,” he said.
Further downstream from Lyon’s home, in the town of Cedar Creek, the water breached the banks and flooded the land around the confluence of Horsemill Creek and Kelly Creek.
Most of the damage in the area that was accessible Tuesday was a gravel parking lot. It had been completely stripped of gravel during the floods and was a muddy bog on Tuesday.
Ken Barton was on site, leaning against a dump truck with a cane in hand. He used to be mayor, but on Tuesday he was working with construction crews wearing bright yellow “Town of Cedar Creek” shirts and reflective overalls.
“You can see where all the mud and everything is,” Lyon said. “The water came out this way, pushed all this stuff over here.”
He said the mayor asked him and the rest of the crew to head down and help the state crews. His crews worked alongside state crews to clean up the damage and restore the banks of the creek.
“These are our people, we have to help,” Barton said.
Several homes were lost, and more were damaged in Monday’s flood.
On Monday, there were more than 700 calls and 22 water rescues. Some towns saw roadways turn into rivers. Access to these towns is still limited as of Wednesday, and crews are working to open roadways that were blocked by fallen trees and mudslides.
The damage assessment process began Tuesday, and officials are beginning the process of working with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and other national and state agencies to get money back to the communities to help with recovery and cleanup.
“We had no warning. The high river was our warning,” Carper said. “When the calls started coming to 911 and people were literally running out of their homes fleeing, and roads were being covered up, washed out, that was our warning. And then the National Weather Service put out just about the strongest alert they know how to put out for floods.”
The unofficial damage toll for communities hit the hardest by Monday and Tuesday’s floods will not be known for several days. And that’s if the weather cooperates.
Kanawha County Commission President Kent Carper said he has talked with people who have suffered devastating loss after up to nine inches of rain fell in a short span of time in some areas.
“We had no warning. The high river was our warning,” Carper said. “When the calls started coming to 911 and people were literally running out of their homes fleeing, and roads were being covered up, washed out, that was our warning. And then the National Weather Service put out just about the strongest alert they know how to put out for floods.”
Carper said the unusual weather pattern created the perfect storm for areas already deluged by a downpour of rain on Saturday.
“They were already saturated, the creeks were full, ” Carper said. “There was nowhere for this massive amount of rain to go.”
While immediate rescue efforts by the National Guard and firefighters mitigated a potential loss of life, reports of damage to properties and homes is high. Carper said he sees the need to request federal assistance and attempt to meet the disaster declaration threshold to offset the flood damage.
“We’re going to work with our citizens, neighbors, friends, try to get federal assistance, work with Congress, with Senators Manchin and Capito, and Congresswoman Miller,” Carper said. “We always hear, ‘Well there weren’t that many deaths.’ Well, when someone loses everything they own, that is devastating.”
The Kanawha County Commission meanwhile has announced supply distribution points for flood victims at the following locations from 8:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. daily.
Belle Town Hall located at 1100 E Dupont Ave, Belle
Chesapeake Town Hall located at 12404 MacCorkle Ave SE, Chesapeake
Donations, specifically, contractor grade trash bags, bleach, push brooms, and shovels will be gratefully accepted. People are requested to not drop off clothing at these locations.
The Kanawha-Charleston Health Department will be administering free tetanus vaccines in Belle this week for those affected by recent flooding.
The mobile shot clinic will be at the Belle Town Hall distribution site Wednesday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.
“Floodwaters carry disease-causing organisms that can lead to serious illness or even death,” Dr. Steven Eshenaur, KCHD’s Health Officer said. “Foremost, stay out of the floodwaters. If you’ve already been in them or are conducting cleanup now, please make sure your tetanus shot is up to date”
Eshenaur said Tetanus is a serious disease but is easily preventable. “If you get a wound – small or large – tend to it immediately. Bacteria can invade your body through the smallest punctures and scratches.”
KCHD will have Environmental Health staff in the affected area this week to answer questions, test private and community wells, and help provide public health safety guidance for businesses so they can reopen as soon as possible.
Residents of homes with private or community wells are advised to contact KCHD for testing of any well, pump, springs, cisterns or pipes that have been exposed to floodwaters. Private water system testing of in-use wells serving flood-impacted homes will be free.
The back-to-back horrific McDowell County floods of 2001 and 2002 were widely reported by print, radio and TV, but these outlets could not tell the story and bring healing like Alan Cathead Johnston’s ballad, Muddy Water, with healing effects that still endure.
“It was on a Sunday morning, on the 8th day of July
In the year of 2001
Way down in McDowell County, in the West Virginia hills
This story originally aired in the July 30, 2023 episode of Inside Appalachia.
In the little town of Kimball, on the banks of the Elkhorn Creek, Markella Gianato is making french fries at her Greek-American restaurant called the Ya’Sou. Kimball is in McDowell County, the southernmost county in West Virginia.
Back in the summer of 2001, Markella saw buildings and debris washed away in a horrific flood. People said it was a once-in-a-hundred-year flood, but it wasn’t. Less than a year later, an equally devastating flood tore through the county. This time, Markella, felt the heartbreak of witnessing a futile effort to save a mother and child from floodwaters. “I have had to have treatment for PTSD and so forth,” she said.
She says part of her healing has also come from a song — a ballad about the floods called “Muddy Water.”
“At first, it was very hard for me to hear it,” she said. “I could not talk about it at first. Now, it seems like it’s just part of my heart. Every phrase of that song is so real.”
Gianato uses the ballad story to tell her story when she talks to SWAP volunteer mission groups who come to the county to do repair work in the summers. She opened her PowerPoint presentation, and looking at a photo said, “That’s Richard Jones; that’s the guy who rescued my dad.”
In the background audio, Alan Johnston and his daughter’s voice sing the ballad. Johnston wrote “Muddy Water” in the summer of 2002. As Gianato looks at the slide show, Johnston sings, “we wondered if it was ever gonna end.”
“That part touches me,” Gianato said, and she remembers how rising waters forced her to retreat with her family to the upstairs apartment of her father’s grocery store, where she found her 13-year-old son attaching an empty milk jug to her father’s waist.
“Lightning flashed around us, and the thunder shook the ground, and we wondered if it was ever gonna end,” — these lyrics of Muddy Water described the anxiety of those like Gianato’s family, who were trapped in the brick building (right), surrounded by at least 7 feet of water.
Courtesy Markella Gianato
“And I said, ‘What are you doing?’ and he said, ‘My papoo might not remember how to swim. But if something happens and the rescue gets botched, or the building doesn’t stay under us, he’ll float and they’ll find him.’ He put a belt through the handle of that milk jug and around my daddy’s chest. That rascal had thought that far ahead,” Gianato said.
After waters receded, rescuers reached them with an endloader.
“I call the PowerPoint presentation ‘Forever Changed,’” Gianato said, “because it changed my life, changed our town, but mostly it changed me.”
Centered on the restaurant’s wall of historical family photos and news articles, is the photo of the flooded building.
Credit: Connie Kitts/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
New Dreams And Old Friends
Reflecting on the ballad lyric, “From Keystone down to Landgraf, and from Kimball into Welch, Muddy Water washed away our hopes and dreams.” Gianato said she sees two sides of those ballad words now. “It washes your hopes and dreams away but they come back to you sometimes. It may be different,” she said.
And that “different” for her is the restaurant she now operates. It’s not the original grocery store her father had operated since 1947, and it’s not her dream of the sandwich shop she’d planned, which washed away in the 2002 flood. But the dream that emerged instead was this Ya’Sou Restaurant and West Virginia Grocery. She’s still honoring the spot where her immigrant father started his dream, and the people of Kimball have a place to gather and hear live music on the weekends.
Alan Johnston performed Muddy Water at the Ya’Sou numerous times before the COVID-19 shutdowns. Gianato and Johnston are friends who have known each other since high school and they have lived through at least six major county floods in their lifetimes.
The Ya’Sou, nicknamed “The Breadbasket of Kimball” on signage, was formerly A.P. Wood Grocery Store.
Credit: Connie Kitts/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Johnston will still occasionally drop into the Ya’Sou for a burger. Many know him by his nickname of “Cathead” because of the cathead biscuits he loves to eat. He’s lived in McDowell County his whole life. He’s worked at everything from school teaching to furnace repair to grocery store management and juke box repair. He’s photographed his county end-to-end, and has written ballads about its range of characters, including John Hardy the gambler, Sid Hatfield the sheriff, and Homer Hickam the NASA scientist. He combines his passion for history, photography and music on his YouTube channel.
Don Rigsby, national bluegrass artist of eastern Kentucky, considers Johnston one of West Virginia’s finest songwriters.
“He equated the muddy water to having its own soul, its own personality and goals, instead of it just being a form of matter that we can’t create or destroy,” said Rigsby. “He gave it power beyond just being water in the river. He gave it life and character. And that’s very, very clever writing.”
Rigsby said Johnston is all about the feeling in a song first. “The old blues guys from back in the 1920s and ’30s and ’40s were the same way,” he said.
Rigsby recorded his version of Muddy Water with the iconic Vassar Clements on fiddle and Kenny Malone on percussion. “You can hear the fiddle making the devil-laughter up there, if you listen,” said Rigsby. “It’s one of my favorite pieces of music I’ve ever recorded,” he said.
He added that it’s also a legacy piece for him, as both Clements and Malone have passed away. And it’s special for Johnston, as Clements is his favorite fiddler.
Music Is In The Genes
Johnston grew up on Premier Mountain, just west of Welch, the county seat. He still lives there. Music is in his genes. When he was about 5 years old, he sang the coal mining ballad “Sixteen Tons” in the grocery store.
“So they put me up on the meat case there and I’d sing it,” he said. “I must have been a sight,” he said.
Johnston’s grandmother played the clawhammer banjo and passed that down to Johnston’s father, a coal miner and prize-winning fiddle player.
Alan Johnston’s grandmother, Clara Blankenship Johnston on banjo, Druey Mitchem on fiddle, and father Raymond Johnston on accordion, in Carswell Holler in 1953.
Courtesy Alan Johnston
“Daddy, he was awesome on clawhammer banjo and the fiddle, and he played guitar very well,” Johnston said.
“So every night when I came home from school, after I got my homework done and everything, it was just play music, play music. Every night. And then he would give me a pointer or two. He’d say, ‘Do that like this, do that like this.’” Johnston said.
Raymond Johnston (left) on fiddle, and Alan on guitar. Alan taught himself banjo first, and he received his first guitar one Christmas.
Courtesy Alan Johnston
Musical Talent Passes Down
Johnston specializes in upright acoustic bass and guitar but he can also play mandolin, fiddle, banjo, electric guitar and keyboards. And perhaps any other instrument put in his hands. He’s the one playing all the instruments in the mix of Muddy Water. And he also sang.
“I’m not much of a singer,” he says. “I come up short on that end, but my daughters are fantastic singers.”
The voices of both Jessi Shumate and Stacy Grubb are familiar to many in McDowell County and Johnston recorded a version of Muddy Water with each daughter.
Jessi Shumate and Stacy Grubb, accompanied by Alan Johnston.
Courtesy Alan Johnston
When Muddy Water played on the radio, shortly after the floods, it became the most requested song at WELC, the Welch, West Virginia AM radio station.
People wanted CDs of the song. Johnston thought he would mimic the old 45 rpm record singles. “And there was two songs on it. And front and back, you know, A side, B side. And I thought, well, that’s what I’ll do,” Johnston said. So he put two songs on a CD disk and made 50 copies, using his own home studio, printer and supplies. He took them with him to work.
“And before I could clock in, the 50 were gone and when I came to work the next day, people were outside waiting to get one,” he said.
He said he had to charge something to recoup the cost of supplies, so he sold them for $3 a piece. “I ended up selling over 5,000 of them,” he said.
The ballad was given out on CDs at class reunions, covered by national artists — including bluegrass performer Don Rigsby and David Davis — and it was often played at festivals and flood reunions.
Muddy Water was often one of the first requested songs at festivals, Johnston said. He plays here with Charlie Davis and Johnny Prevento at the Asco Hollow Reunion.
Courtesy Alan Johnston
Ballad Says What People Could Not Say
It’s the recording that still circulates on the internet that Cynthia Cox remembers hearing. Cox grew up in Northfork Hollow, about 10 miles east of Kimball. Her home was severely damaged in the floods and they made the hard decision of moving about 15 miles south to Bluewell, West Virginia, in neighboring Mercer County.
She’s still deeply moved by Muddy Water.
“Even driving in the county now, I still think at times that happened yesterday,” she said as she listened to the song on her smartphone. “The people stay with you and the song stays with you.”
Cox listens to and loves all kinds of music. “Growing up, McDowell County music was a part of your life to survive. And the musical love in my generation was because of our parents and our grandparents. Also music in church. It was a coping skill,” she said.
She loves the instrumentation in the beginning of the song. “Just hearing the rift of the music in itself draws you in. And then when you listen to the lyrics, yes, it offered comfort that we couldn’t speak,” she said.
The song lyrics also expressed the anger people felt, Cox said.
“Some people blamed the coal mines and the timber industry.
They called it the 100 year flood.“
“The anger toward the timber and coal mining was real. And he spoke it when he sang it. He could say what we couldn’t say,” she said.
What she hears in the song is a common language of empathy and struggle. “He put the community in the lyrics,” she said. “You know, the news articles tried to capture it, the photographs back then tried to capture it. But you don’t really hear it and feel the story, too, until you hear him sing Muddy Water,” Cox said.
Second Flood Brings More Suffering And Lessons
“But less than 10 months later, on the second day of May
The thunder clapped and rain began to fall.
And we ate the words that we had spoken way back in July
Muddy Water you made liars of us all.“
Johnston’s lyrics capture the unbelief people felt when the second 100-year flood came 10 months later. “If you would’ve told anyone at that time, there’s a flood coming tomorrow, and it’s gonna wash it all away, we’d called them a liar,” Cox said. “Like, are you just crazy? You’re talking nonsense, but it became a reality,” she said.
“Well we worked so hard to put back
What you took away before, just to have you come and take it all again
Ten thousand people cried, seven people died
And I could hear the devil laughin’ in the wind.“
Cox said she now lives with a faith that accepts that disasters may come. “We’re not invincible from any kind of natural disaster. You don’t think, ‘I might face a train derailment of toxic chemicals’ like the East Palestine train derailment, until the things happen.”
Music can give a sense of community even when devastation and natural disasters destroy it, Cox said. “So you need music. You need healthy outlets.”
“The therapy that comes from his music helped us to grieve, which gave us strength so we could rebuild and regather to like, okay, we’re either gonna stay down here or we’re gonna have to move. I commend those who were able to stay, and at times I envy that because once your county, that’s always home.”
Johnston said someone once told him he lived in a cool place. “The man said, ‘Everybody writes songs about where you live, you know, in Appalachia. Nobody has ever written a song about where I live,’” Johnston said he thought about that a while. “And I thought, it is a cool place to live. I wouldn’t live anywhere else.”
——
This story is part of the Inside Appalachia Folkways Reporting Project, a partnership with West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s Inside Appalachia and the Folklife Program of the West Virginia Humanities Council.
The Folkways Reporting Project is made possible in part with support from Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies to the West Virginia Public Broadcasting Foundation. Subscribe to the podcast to hear more stories of Appalachian folklife, arts and culture.
One of the first presentations West Virginia lawmakers heard after gaveling in for the 2018 state Legislative session was one to help them more effectively guide their districts in the face of emergencies.
Since 2009, there have been 21 state emergency proclamations, 10 Federal Emergency Management Agency major disaster declarations, and 4 FEMA emergency declarations – that’s according to Jimmy Gianato, Director of the West Virginia Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management.
Both Gianato and Major General James Hoyer of the West Virginia National Guard spoke with lawmakers about the best steps to take to ensure proper aid is sent efficiently when disasters occur.
Hoyer told lawmakers it’s important to first communicate with their local Emergency Operations Center.
“If you can continue to encourage people at your level in your districts, to flow their requests up through the local EOC,” Hoyer said, “it significantly helps us in managing that overarching piece by flowing things to the right focus points for us to get to.”
Those focus points could include coordinating additional aid or supplies, volunteer groups, or reaching out to FEMA if a situation is bad enough.
“The quicker we can document damage and push it up to FEMA, the sooner we can get a declaration, which means, the flow of federal money comes faster.”
Hoyer and Gianato said, however, districts should be prepared enough to go up to 72 hours before additional aid is sent.
On the far side of the Charleston Civic Center, about a thousand blue and red clad supporters scream their support.
Many are wearing shirts emblazoned with #Riverstrong on the back. For these fans, tonight is as much about showing a community of resilience as celebrating a team making history.
That’s because last June, flooding devastated much of southern West Virginia, destroying homes, buildings and schools. One of the affected facilities was Herbert Hoover High School, which did not reopen for the 2016-2017 school year. Instead, Hoover now shares a building with Elkview Middle School. The middle school attends in the morning and the high school in the afternoon. But despite these odds, Hoover’s varsity basketball team made it to the final 8 state tournament for the first time in the school’s history.
“I think the one thing that people need to know is – ok we got flooded. We lost our high school. Our kids are going to a half a day of school cramming as many core classes as they can in a certain period of time, practicing basketball in the YMCA and they haven’t missed a beat,” said Joey Robertson, father of Hoover junior Gavin Robertson.
“The one thing I learned through all this is just how resilient students can be and just roll with the punches,” he said. “If it happened it to me, or when it did happen, I was devastated! I mean here you don’t have a high school, what’s your kid going to do? But our kids and our community, they’ve just rolled with it, haven’t let it get them down.”
Hoover was undoubtedly the underdog in Thursday’s game, but senior Chase King said the team came to fight.
“Looking back last year with all the seniors we lost and then over the summer when we lost our school, it was really hard to picture any success this year,” he said.
Both King and Coach Josh Daniels said what makes this team different is how hard the team worked both in and out of season.
“This is probably the toughest bunch of guys who’ve come through the Elk River,” King continued. “I mean so much heart comes through this program and it’s all thanks to these guys.”
On the court, King and the rest of the Huskies are battled it out against Fairmont. It was a tough slog for them. Fairmont was big, fast and strong and the Polar Bears got a couple points early in the game.
At times it seemed like the Huskies might be on the path toward clawing their way back at just five or six points behind. But as the game progressed, the Polar Bears began to build more of a lead.
And then it was over. Fairmont 59, Hoover 39.
For Hoover Principal Michael Kelley, just getting to the state tournament is a testament to the tenacity and resilience of this group of boys, though.
“I think this team – I think that’s one of the reasons – in addition to it being our first state championship team – I think it’s one of the reasons the community is so excited about it – they kind of embody what the community has gone through,” he said.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this story stated that Herbert Hoover High School competed in the sweet 16 state tournament. The school actually competed in the final 8 state tournament.
