On Nov. 5, 2020, a popular restaurant in Fayetteville, West Virginia burned to the ground. The Secret Sandwich Society was a destination for travelers, and a popular gathering place. Student reporter at the Fayette institute of Technology Bryson Saprio reports what the fire means for the community, and what’s next in rebuilding.
Fayetteville, a small town in the heart of West Virginia known for its rafting and outdoor community, hosts a variety of places to eat popular with residents and visitors.
The Secret Sandwich Society, a town favorite restaurant and a hotspot for the music scene in Fayetteville, was popular for their unique sandwiches and late night live music. The restaurant lived in a historic 100 year old building.
Lewis Rhinehart, the proud owner of the eatery, watched as it all went up into flames.
“We were operating at our highest level of efficiency that we had ever operated at,” he said. “And then on Nov. 5, it all burned down.”
“I mean, everybody was just in shock,” said Fayetteville Mayor Sharon Cruikshank. “Everybody was really devastated for Lewis and the staff. It was very upsetting.”
After dedicating years of his life into making Secret Sandwich Society what it was, Rhinehart was devastated and heartbroken.
“But in the weeks after that, you know, I just cried and cried and cried and cried,” he said. “I mean, it was terrible. Yeah. You know, I’d wake up and cry, go to the shower and cry. You know, it was just awful.”
The Secret Sandwich Society had live music performances five nights a week, bringing people to the area.
Losing the restaurant also meant the loss of a big part of the Fayetteville music scene, said Cruikshank.
“I think Secret became such a destination in itself just because of the music and the food,” she said. “So the fire was really devastating to us, because they brought such a neat vibe to the town.”
Courtesy
Owner of the Secret Sandwich Society Lewis Rhinehart sadi community support, and support from across the state, was overwhelming.
Community support and support from across the state, Rhinehart said, was overwhelming.
“The outpouring of support in those weeks after that, yeah,” he said. “So, in literally that day, in that evening. I got a phone call from [Sen.] Joe Manchin. I got a phone call from [Rep.] Carol Miller. I got a phone call from [Sen.] Shelley Moore Capito. I got letters from the Charleston City Council. It was really just incredible.”
Fayetteville showed its true colors after the building burnt down, said Adam Mathews — Rhinehart’s right hand man.
“When that building burned down everybody was just there for us,” Mathews said. “That was it. Yeah, it was very emotional. It was surreal.”
Cruikshank said the loss of the restaurant was a big hit to the community.
“It created a deficit of places for people to eat, when they were in the New River Gorge area,” she said. “Secret was a very successful business for Fayetteville. ”
After a year-long search for a new location to rebuild, Rhinehart settled on the same property.
“Then we really started revisiting the rebuild idea,” he said. “We closed on the deal for the building at the end of last November. So, what has been happening now is the building is designed and ready to go.”
The new restaurant design pays homage to the old building and imitates the nostalgic feel of the previous restaurant, but still adds elements of a modern layout. Rhinehart and Mathews added things into the new restaurant to increase speed and productivity.
“There was a silver lining to all this pain and stress and frustration and you know, everything,” Rhinehart said. “We are getting a building that we want now. We are getting a building that we can deliver the output and quality that we’ve always wanted.”
As construction starts, there’s a sense of anticipation growing, and an appreciation for the resiliency demonstrated this past year.
“Phoenix rising from the ashes type metaphor,” Mathews said. “I mean, it’s like everybody said that there’s irony or whatever in how we went out and there’s, you know, a great deal of symbolism to me and how we’re coming back.”
“I don’t think that it can happen too soon,” said Cruikshank. “I think everybody’s way past ready for [Rhinehart] to open up. So I think it’ll be a really nice homecoming. It definitely will be a town celebration.”
Rhinehart and his team say they’re planning to have their doors to their new restaurant open by this fall.
Bryson Sapio is a high school junior at the Fayette Institute of Technology. He reported this story as part of a project with Inside Appalachia to learn how to make radio stories.
The rain came hard and fast early on the morning of June 23, 2016. By 2 p.m., water was knee deep in Bill Bell’s appliance store on Main Street in Rainelle, a small town on the western edge of Greenbrier County, West Virginia. Bell began elevating the washing machines and dishwashers, thinking that would be enough. Within hours, he’d lose it all. Today, his shop is up and running once again, but the memory of the flood runs deep.
“To be honest with you, everybody here sleeps on pins and needles when it calls for a big rain,” he says.
John Wyatt, a Baptist minister, city councilor and local music and craft shop owner, remembers pulling his friends and neighbors out of the water.
Credit Brittany Patterson / WVPB
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WVPB
John Wyatt poses for a photo in his music and craft shop in Rainelle, WV.
He helped rescue 22 people using a two-person kayak and a flat-bottomed boat: The owner of the local funeral home and her elderly father. A young couple stranded on top of the baseball dugout at the local park. He remembers the swiftness of the water and the way propane gas drifted on top of the torrent like an eerie fog. As he drives through the neighborhood, he says quietly that not everyone survived.
“The second house down that street, there was an old gentleman that lost his life,” he says.
About a two hour-drive to the north, Sarah Bird had gone out to run a few errands that day. A few hours later she couldn’t get back into her small town of Clendenin, located right on the Elk River. She decided to head to a nearby hotel. Then, the bridge leading to the shopping center where it was located washed out. She spent the next two days in that hotel. Much of the region lacked power and employees at the nearby Kroger grocery store barbecued food out of the freezer cases for displaced residents.
When the waters receded and she was finally able to get back, she recalls every moment of that drive.
“Town was devastated,” she says, beginning to cry. “It was gray from the mud.”
She was one of the lucky ones. The waters got close, but they didn’t reach her house. Twenty-three people were killed by the 2016 floods, making it one of the deadliest on record. More than 1,500 homes and businesses were destroyed, and another 2,500 significantly damaged, while losses to highways and bridges totaled about $53 million.
Three-and-a-half-years later, the worst-hit communities are still rebuilding. The National Weather Service would later say the intensity and amount of rain that fell in late June 2016, was of a magnitude expected once in 1,000 years.
Scientists, some state lawmakers and even federal agencies are sounding the alarm that West Virginia’s once-in-a-millennia 2016 downpour that lead to catastrophic flooding is not an isolated event. The hydrologic system that humanity has relied on and built its infrastructure around is changing. The future will be both more intense and more variable.
But as communities rebuild, the state’s response to the climate challenge has been mixed, at best, raising questions about how prepared people will be for the next disaster. While some officials and planning documents do acknowledge the threat of climate change to West Virginia, a state office established after the 2016 flood to enhance resiliency has stalled.
About this project: InsideClimate News convened a group of Southeast journalists in Nashville, Tennessee, in late September, at the First Amendment Center on the Vanderbilt University campus, to develop a joint reporting project centered on holding their communities accountable for responding to climate change. “Caught Off Guard: The American Southeast Struggles With Climate Change” features reports from nine newsrooms in seven Southeastern states and ICN.
“There’s a disconnect there,” scientist Nicolas Zegre said. An associate professor of forest hydrology at West Virginia University, Zegre studies the state’s water resources. He says too many officials are still avoiding talking about climate change.
“If we can’t even have conversations in Charleston about what climate change is, and that it’s happening,” he asked, “how can we have hazard mitigation designed in a way that meaningfully protects the public when climate change isn’t even part of that decision making?”
‘1,000-Year Downpour’
Flooding is not new in West Virginia. The Mountain State is one of the most flood-prone states in the country, largely because of the topography. Rain that falls on the state’s mountain peaks eventually runs down into the steep valleys, or hollows. West Virginia experiences both riverine flooding, when streams and rivers overflow their banks, and flash flooding.
In addition, many homes and businesses are near those flood-prone waterways, according to Brian Farkas. Farkas leads the West Virginia Conservation Agency, the administrative arm of the State Conservation Committee, which is charged with overseeing conservation efforts. He said West Virginia has one of the highest stream-to-land ratios on the North American continent. With flat land in short supply, he said much of the state’s development has occurred in the narrow valleys along creeks.
“Floodplains became a natural place for development,” he said. “That’s all well and good until you have a series of rain events, and you have streams that are just doing what streams are designed to do when there is a lot of water: They come out of their bank, they go to the floodplain.”
According to the National Centers for Environmental Information, there have been 2,302 flood events in West Virginia between January 1993 and July 2017, resulting in an estimated $1.8 billion in property damages and 103 deaths. Flood-producing extreme precipitation is the costliest and most severe natural hazard West Virginia faces.
Credit Kara Lofton / WVPB
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West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Clendenin, WV faced intense rainfall that led to deadly flooding in June 2016.
In the first paragraph of the executive summary of a study conducted by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, on lessons learned from the 2016 floods, the agency states that while many residents felt the flooding was as bad as it could get, that’s not true.
“In fact, this type of event could happen more frequently than previously thought,” it states.
Setbacks For Resilience
Following the 2016 floods, the West Virginia Legislature took proactive steps to address flood risk. It passed House Bill 2935, which created a joint legislative committee to address flooding and created a new state office dedicated to boosting resilience.
According to the bill, the stated goal of the newly-created State Resiliency Office was to coordinate “all economic and community resiliency planning and implementation efforts, including but not limited to flood protection programs and activities in the state.” That included updating the state’s flood protection plan “no less than biannually” and recommending legislation to reduce or mitigate flood damage.
In short, the State Resiliency Office and its board were supposed to be the state’s one-stop-shop for making communities better able to withstand catastrophic flooding.
Today, the office is barely functional. It has one employee. State lawmakers are proposing new legislation to reshape its structure.
According to documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, despite having three meetings in 2017 to stand up the agency, in June 2018 the State Resiliency Office was told to disband further activities by the state Department of Commerce under which it is currently situated.
The West Virginia Department of Commerce did not make someone available to speak about the State Resiliency Office despite multiple interview requests.
Since then, Adjutant General James Hoyer, head of the West Virginia National Guard, and who was made head of the 2016 flooding recovery efforts in June 2018, said he has largely taken on the duties of the State Resiliency Office.
“I think that’s an important effort going forward,” he said. “But I think what we’ve got to start to look at is how do we build resiliency, not just from the standpoint of disaster, but economic resiliency, and pull all those things together and develop some plans going forward.”
When asked to what extent the Guard or other agencies working on flood recovery are factoring in climate change in building resiliency, Hoyer said it’s not something he’s thinking about.
“I would tell you as the guy in uniform, you know, my job’s not to get into those debates,” he said. “My job is to address the long term, you know, resiliency piece going forward.”
Missing Element
House Bill 2935 also created the Joint Legislative Committee on Flooding. Members like Democratic state Sen. Stephen Baldwin, said the body has focused on the state’s botched flood recovery response efforts and not flood prevention as its charter states.
“You used the term climate change, and to my knowledge, that term has not been used ever in a joint flood committee,” he said.
The committee’s charter said it has a statutory obligation to consider how West Virginia can be better prepared in the face of future flooding by studying “flood damage reduction and floodplain management” as well as “flood protection.” In a September letter to the committee’s chairs, Baldwin and fellow Democratic Sen. Glenn Jeffries expressed concerns that the committee could be doing more on prevention. Baldwin said while he understands recovery is important, factoring in the future climate is important to lessening the impacts of flood disasters.
“The specific constitutional charge of the flood committee is flood prevention. I mean, it uses that terminology several times,” he added. “But, you know, from a very general 30,000-foot view, the committee has done no work on flood prevention so far.”
Credit Eric Douglas / WVPB
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WVPB
Clendenin, West Virginia is one of the towns still recovering from the deadly 2016 floods.
The co-chairs of the committee say they have been focused on getting people back into their homes after a scandal with the way nearly $150 million in federal disaster relief grants were being administered through the RISE program.
Republican state Sen. Chandler Swope is one of the chairs. Moving forward, he said he expects to focus more on prevention and pointed to recent presentations made to the committee from a firm familiar with disaster recovery in Puerto Rico. When asked specifically if climate change is being incorporated into the committee’s prevention efforts, Swope said the body is not planning for a specific future, but said any resilience work being done in the state will help.
“But climate change has been happening for millions of years and it’s going to continue to change and you just have to deal with it,” he said.
The state doesn’t have a great track record when it comes to implementing its own recommendations to reduce flooding. In 2001 after another historic flood, a panel came together and developed a set of comprehensive recommendations to reduce the damage from flooding. As reported by The Charleston Gazette-Mail, the report sat on the shelf collecting dust.
The state’s Hazard Mitigation Plan updated in 2018 does explicitly mention the threats West Virginia faces from a changing climate, including the impact of intense rainfall events.
“If climate change has an effect on those things over a period of time, if we’re trending towards a dryer or it’s going to be wetter, then those are factors we considered in the mitigation plan,” said Lonnie Bryson, recovery grants section chief for the West Virginia Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management. “So we can mitigate the things we’re aware of. But 2016 was just such a magnitude that there’s no predicting that.”
Scientists, like Nicolas Zegre at WVU, said it’s true that researchers cannot be certain about future natural disasters, and they can’t say when a precipitation event like 2016 will happen again.
But they say the models are clear, and more intense precipitation events are expected.
“Nothing is going to be meaningful unless we have honest conversations about climate change and what it means for West Virginia,” he said.
For homeowners, some resilience is being incorporated in the rebuilding efforts that have occurred since the 2016 floods, largely driven by federal standards.
Federal Backstop
On a recent drive through Rainelle, the neighborhoods do look markedly different than they did just a few years ago. Spray painted X’s mark homes now abandoned that will eventually be torn down. Most of those that have been rebuilt are obvious — they tower 8 to 12 feet above their neighbors. That’s intentional.
Credit Brittany Patterson / WVPB
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WVPB
Homes rebuilt in the floodplain are being elevated.
Much of the rebuilding following the 2016 floods is being done with federal money. A presidential disaster declaration unlocked millions of dollars in federal aid from both FEMA and Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD. In recent years both agencies have adopted stipulations for federal disaster aid grants that ensure homes damaged by natural disasters are rebuilt to be more resilient for the next one.
According to a FEMA spokesperson, homes that are reconstructed using Hazard Mitigation Grant program dollars are built two feet above the required base flood elevation, or 100-year floodplain, in West Virginia.
But the Trump administration in 2016 also rescinded an Obama-era executive order that tasked agencies to incorporate climate change into proposed infrastructure projects. FEMA had been soliciting input and drafting new rules.
Carolyn Kousky is executive director of the Risk Management and Decision Processes Center at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, which for 35 years has studied disaster risk management. She said the order would have created uniform guidance on rebuilding and incorporating changing flood conditions due to climate change. As it stands, states and municipalities largely set the tone for how climate change is incorporated into rebuilding homes and infrastructure.
“I think a lot of it is left up to what local governments choose to do,“ she said. “Smaller and less affluent communities might not have the resources or the expertise.”
Improving Data
In the aftermath of the 2016 floods, FEMA put out a press release that said West Virginia is more resilient and better prepared. The agency funded new maps in eight of the areas hardest hit by flooding in June 2016, a spokesperson said.
The agency also invested in a digital flood mapping tool, one of the first in the country to cover an entire state. The WV Flood Tool has been in production since 2007, but investment after the 2016 floods allowed project developers to expand the project to provide communities with a detailed picture of flood risk and landslide risk.
Under the “risk” tab, users can not only see their flood risk per FEMA’s 100-year floodplain maps, but, if available, FEMA’s updated flood maps. All critical infrastructure — hospitals, schools, utilities — are mapped on the tool to the 500-year floodplain.
“We’re going to be able to identify the risk, or be able to map that in detail like it’s never been done before statewide,” said Kurt Donaldson, manager of the WV GIS Technical Center at West Virginia University and project manager for the flood tool.
He said advances in technology in the last decade have made creating a centralized flood risk tool possible, but he also said the project only focuses on riverine flooding and landslide risk and can only input data it has available, and much of that data doesn’t take into consideration future climate change.
Relying on FEMA floodplain maps to assess flood risk is problematic because the maps were created to serve the agency’s insurance program, said Larry Larson, director emeritus and senior policy adviser for the National Association of State Floodplain Managers. The maps notoriously don’t cover all flood risk.
“It has become the flood risk standard, and that’s unfortunate, but that’s how people perceive it,” he said.
In West Virginia, most counties have adopted a “model floodplain ordinance” that goes beyond FEMA’s National Flood Insurance Program minimum guidelines. As a result, in most places new structures built in the floodplain to be raised an additional two feet above the 100-year floodplain.
Ray Perry, the floodplain manager for Logan County and head of the West Virginia Floodplain Managers Association, said the requirement is helpful to create a buffer against flooding but he would like to see the state go further and create a similar model ordinance for building codes.
“If you’re one of the people that the floodplain ordinance doesn’t necessarily apply to you because you’re not in a floodplain, you can’t enforce it on somebody,” he said. “Without the building code, then you’re just doomed to repeat it over and over.”
New Attitude
Inside John Wyatt’s music and craft shop in downtown Rainelle guitars and banjos line the walls. He says more than three years after the flooding most of the renovations are complete and he hopes to open the store to the public soon.
Reminders of the flood still remain. Across the street an Exxon gas station is empty, the cost of Supreme $2.99 in perpetuity. Next door, a sign advertises an auction for the Rainelle Motor Lodge. The motel was abandoned after the flood.
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WVPB
In Rainelle, West Virginia some businesses never reopened after the 2016 floods.
Newly-elected Ranielle Mayor Jason Smith said the 2016 flood has been tough economically for the town. Asked if he thought Rainelle was better prepared now for a disaster of that magnitude, he said he hopes so.
“But you know, we don’t have a crystal ball to look in and know what’s going to happen in the future,” he said. “We’re working on some issues with that to try to help the flood control in town. It’s a long process, and we hope that we can work all together and make that happen, but at the same time, you know, things like this just take time.”
Wyatt is now a city council member in Ranielle. He and others are thinking about the future of this coal turned timber town that has been struggling in recent decades. The community is raising money to build a community center and he hopes Rainelle can become a destination for tourists traveling the scenic Midland Trail. He said while the town is still struggling — dozens of structures still need to be torn down, for example — the flooding also changed his thinking about the place he’s lived much of life.
“Maybe the most important new construction has been the attitude of the people because they’re beginning to see Rainelle as a town that can survive, that’s not going to die, that does have hope for the future,” he said.
This story was produced in partnership with InsideClimate News, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news outlet that covers climate, energy and the environment.Caught Off Guard was produced as part of ICN’sNational Environmental News Network.
Resourceful. Self-reliant. These are some of the values many people who live in the mountains pride themselves on. But could we sustain ourselves? As part of our occasional series “Wild, Wondering, West Virginia,” Lana Lester of Wyoming County submitted her question to the Inside Appalachia team: “Could West Virginia Be Self-Sustaining?” She said she, “always had the feeling that God Blessed West Virginia with all of our natural resources and we have everything there in the state to survive.”
Resourceful. Self-reliant. These are some of the values many people who live in the mountains pride themselves on. But could we sustain ourselves? As part of our occasional series “Wild, Wondering, West Virginia,” Lana Lester of Wyoming County submitted her question to the Inside Appalachia team: “Could West Virginia Be Self-Sustaining?” She said she, “always had the feeling that God Blessed West Virginia with all of our natural resources and we have everything there in the state to survive.”
So, could we survive, on our own? And what would that really look like? We set out to try to find some answers.
Survivalist Store And Some Goats
Our search began outside a survival shop in Cross Lanes, a suburb of Charleston.
In a small pen outside, there was a herd of Nigerian Dwarf goats. “They are small, but they have the highest butter, fat content of any of the dairy goats,” said Bob Keller, the owner of Keller’s Survival Shop. These goats are mostly pets. But if needed, they could provide his family with goat milk.
Roxy Todd stands with a few Nigerian Dwarf goats and talks with their owner Bob Keller, outside his survivalist shop in Cross Lanes, W.Va. Credit: Eric Douglas/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
“They breed, they give birth, they produce milk and as long as you continue to milk them they’ll continue to produce milk,” Keller said.
Goats can also provide meat. Raising goats is just one way people with a small plot of land could be more self-sufficient, Keller said.
“People really don’t realize if you took a 10 by 20 spot in the yard, at home how much food that spot would create.”
Inside his survivalist shop, Keller sells dried food that has a long shelf life, and water purification materials.
“There are people that I know locally that are in the 97 percent self-reliant.”
Some of these people Keller knows might be called “doomsday preppers,” a subgenre of folks who prepare their home to be able to survive on their own, in case of a catastrophic event. But Keller said he sees all ranges of people in his store who are interested in learning to survive without having to go to the store.
“My business in general is going up rapidly.”
Beyond his own business, Keller sees other signs that more people seem to have an interest in self-reliance.
“I mean, even our elementary schools are putting in gardens, right, to teach kids where food comes from. Because the kids don’t know where food comes from,” Keller said.
A child inside a high tunnel garden, managed by Grow Ohio Valley in Wheeling. Credit: Glynis Board/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
This lack of knowledge and skills makes people pretty vulnerable, compared to our grandparents or great-grandparents, Keller said. Things like canning, growing food, carpentry and basic mechanics — there is a lot that our West Virginian ancestors understood that we lost.
“I think it’s a product of 21st century America,” Keller said. “We were sold this approach growing up that well, you if there’s a problem go buy the solution.”
But Keller said he thinks people in West Virginia have retained a lot of these skills and knowledge.
“You go to rural areas and those self-sustaining skills and activities are still alive and well. When you look at less densely populated states, you have a lot of this activity going on.”
But it is not only West Virginians who are interested in learning to be more self-reliant. A survey commissioned by the economic analyst website, www.finder.com, found that in 2018 1 in 4 American adults spent up to $2,000 on home renovations to prepare for emergencies. Millennials actually spent the most on survivalist gear. But does that mean that younger people are more prepared? Or are they just shopping as a way to compensate for a lack of hands on know-how?
“You’re seeing some people who are raising their children to be self-reliant. And you’re seeing some people who, who aren’t self-reliant themselves. Of course, they’re not raising their children that way,” Keller said.
Credit: Glynis Board/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Is Global Trade Essential?
But what would it really mean to be self-sustaining, not just individually, but as a state? Like, what if West Virginia broke away from the rest of the country? Or what if a natural or geopolitical disaster suddenly forced us to make it entirely on our own, cut away from the rest of the country or the world? No importing, no exporting and producing everything ourselves.
We sent our question over to economist John Deskins, at West Virginia University, to get his take.
“What was going through my mind? To be honest, I was thinking, ooh, this is a bad idea. If you want my honest opinion?”
On a personal level, Deskins said he gets why this would be appealing.
“If you want to harvest the deer from your backyard, or if you want to grow your own tomatoes and cucumbers in your backyard, you may be able to do that better than the ones we import from California,” Deskins said. “I’d much rather get a backyard tomato, other than one from the grocery, but people are free to do that.”
As an economist, Deskins thought it would be disastrous if we forced people to buy things that are made locally. Trade is just more efficient, he said, than producing everything ourselves.
“You know, if everyone’s just going it alone, then you don’t really have the opportunity to be really good at something and to capitalize upon your kind of special talent.”
Currently, West Virginia is pretty self-sufficient when it comes to electricity. About 92 percent comes from coal that is mined in the state. Of course, the grid we pull from is a regional grid, so it is possible the electrons you are using right now were not produced by coal. And setting up a new grid that is independent of the rest of the country would take a lot of work, and time. But it is possible as a long-term goal, if the state continues to mine coal.
Five barges full of coal being transported along the Kanawha River in Marmet, W.Va.. The coal is headed to a power plant. Credit: Eric Douglas/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Apart from electricity, though, West Virginia is not so poised to be self-sufficient. We import roughly $3.4 million worth of goods from out of the country, with mechanical products at the top of the list. Incidentally, a lot of the state’s imports include airplane parts, so we could likely do without those if we were just trying to survive on our own.
But when it comes to what we would eat, the picture is a lot more bleak. Despite Bob Keller’s optimism that we could grow a lot of our own food in a 10 by 20 plot in our yard, West Virginians currently produce just one-seventh what we consume when it comes to food. So we would need to support and incentivize farming.
No More Coffee, No More Chocolate
And we would have to do without a lot of foods that just do not grow well here — like lemons, chocolate and coffee. Not to mention a lot of other things that use raw materials that we just do not have in West Virginia, like cell phones, or EKG machines.
And doing without these things, economist John Deskins argued, means we would have a lower quality of life.
John Deskins, director of the Bureau of Business and Economic Research at West Virginia University. Credit: Aaron Shackelford/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
“I’m saying you have two extremes. One extreme is where individual households are self-sufficient. That is an extreme system that’s like a caveman type system. And then the other end of the extreme is a purely global economy where we have specialization across the entire world, and trade on a grand scheme.”
In the middle of these two extremes, though, Deskins said he could imagine a world where we are still importing and exporting some things, but still producing more stuff and growing more food, in state.
“It’s better than no specialization at all. But it’s not fully capitalizing upon the high level of specialization that we have in a global economy,” Deskins said.
Even as a champion of an economic free-market, Deskins admitted there would be some benefits to being more self-sustaining.
“It would greatly reduce the transportation cost. It would reduce the fuel, and other expenses associated with moving goods. And there might be some environmental benefit associated with that,” Deskins said. It would also be easier to keep a closer eye on health and safety standards.
Still, bottom line, if we want our economy to be strong, global trade is essential.
But, something economists like Deskins do not measure when they talk about quality of life, is the desire to buy local, even if it means at a higher cost. Some people would rather pay more money for a chair made by their neighbor, than buy one online that comes from China. And it is the same with food. Some people like the idea of learning to grow their own corn and perhaps taking it to their neighbor to grind it into cornmeal. And inevitably, this might mean learning to survive with less.
Larry Mustain hold heirloom corn called Bloody Butcher, which he grinds inside his historic mill. Credit: Daniel Walker/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
For another perspective on what it could look like to be more self-sustaining, we spoke with Beth Wheatley, who works with the West Virginia Nature Conservancy.“I see a West Virginia that really uses nature as a driver of economic growth,” Wheatley said. “We’re standing atop a ridgeline in Mingo County; in every direction are mountains— some are thick with forests; others are stripped to rubble and rock. Over here we’re looking at a flat landscape, but still completely surrounded by forest on both sides. And this is very typical of many sites in West Virginia where you have former coal mine lands surrounded by intact forest.”She brought us here, because she said it shows two radically different types of landscapes, both of which are abundant in central Appalachia. And both have potential to help people in West Virginia be more self-sufficient, said Wheatley. “There is so much that we can produce ourselves.”
Aerial video in southern W.Va. Credit: Kara Lofton/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Rachel Taylor stands on the front porch of her little yellow house in White Sulphur Springs. The front door is pasted with paw prints where her dog tried to get in during the flood.
Across the street, nestled between two battered houses, is an empty lot marked by a cross with an array of flowers and photos. It’s a memorial for a family washed away by the flood.
The dog? He survived the flood and is now with family in Kentucky. Taylor’s across-the-street neighbors, the Nicelys, did not.
“When I start feeling overwhelmed with this, I just look across the street at that memorial and I think, there’s nothing that we have lost that can’t be replaced or mended,” she said.
Taylor gestured at her gutted living room. She and her husband spent seven years renovating this 1930s Craftsman house, room by room. They were just about done with renovations when their house was flooded a few weeks ago.
“You know, the first couple of days it was very intense. It was kind of crisis mode. Maybe that’s the way I would describe it, because you didn’t really have time to think about it and process it,” said Taylor.
Once the full extent of the damage set in, Taylor said she developed severe nausea and carsickness to the point of not being able to drive.
Credit Kara Lofton / West Virginia Public Broadcasting
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West Virginia Public Broadcasting
A memorial for the Nicely’s sits across the street from Rachel Taylor’s White Sulphur Springs home.
“Talking to different people, they said, ‘That’s probably your nerves – you know, the stress level.’ You don’t realize your body is just having a response to this, [which] isn’t normal for you,” she said.
Taylor has flood insurance that will allow her to rebuild, but she said her family will likely move out of the neighborhood once the home is restored or ready for sale.
“I think the words we use when we talk about it are ‘I don’t know if I have it in me,’ ‘I’m not sure if I can do it again,’ things like that. And then we just say, ‘Well, we’ll take it one day at a time.’”
Experts say this kind of response is normal following natural disasters.
“It’s a physical aspect of the stress response – it will affect the body’s ability to concentrate, to rest and to be able to function,” said Marcie Vaughn, leader of the state-funded West Virginia Crisis Response Team. “Cognition is slowed and impaired,” she added.
In addition to Vaughn’s team, church disaster-assistance teams and the organization Hope Animal Assisted Crisis Response offered material and emotional support to victims, trying to be “a meaningful presence.”
“From the behavioral health perspective, we find we are more in need after the 10th, 12th day, just because immediate needs of food, clothing and shelter take precedence,” said Vaughn.
In the first few days following the flood, Vaughn said her team split their time between helping people replace lost psychiatric medications and looking for signs of mental distress in people at shelters or feeding stations.
“We see fatigue, problems with cognition,” said Vaughn. “You have individuals who walk into a supply center and they have no idea what they need.”
A 2012 study published in the journal of Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology found that while most people bounce back a few months after a disaster, if you don’t address ongoing stressors – such as lack of a home, financial challenges and repeated exposure to the trauma – people will continue to struggle.
“As the fatigue sets in and the frustration, we see an increased need for behavioral health intervention,” said Vaughn.
But their work becomes hardest, she said, when national organizations and media have lost interest and real, tough problems persist, but only the local folks remain to extend helping hands.
Appalachia Health News is a project of West Virginia Public Broadcasting, with support from the Benedum Foundation.
