The agency tasked with operating West Virginia’s 911 centers has filed a complaint against Frontier West Virginia Inc.
The West Virginia Public Service Commission was asked Wednesday to investigate a complaint against Frontier Communications that 10 emergency call centers were unable to field 911 calls for up to 10 hours during a three day period last month.
According to the complaint the WVE911 Council, the umbrella agency that operates 911 centers in the state, alleges that within the past 24 months, several Public-Safety Answering Points (PSAPs) within the state have experienced lengthy outages of 911 service.
The most recent outage was from Nov. 28 through Nov. 30 where Brooke, Ohio, Marshall, Wetzel, Tyler, Doddridge, Ritchie, Harrison, Taylor and Mingo County residents were unable to call 911 for up to 10 hours.
Dean Meadows, executive director for the council, filed the complaint and said the telephone provider has inadequate backup to ensure telephone service to many centers when telephone lines are subject to vandalism or bad weather.
Meadows’ complaint asked the Commission to ensure that Frontier provides proper backup services so “no resident will ever lose the ability to call 911 for emergency assistance.”
“We’re really at our wit’s end about what ought to be done,” Meadows said in a press release.
With new owners, the Mountain Craft Shop Co. will bring traditional folk toys to a new generation of kids.
This story originally aired in the Dec. 23, 2022 episode of Inside Appalachia.
Steve Conlon knew everything about the traditional Appalachian folk toys he and his wife Ellie manufactured at the Mountain Craft Shop Co. in Proctor, West Virginia.
He knew the history, the principle of physics that made them work, and the right technique to make that ball on a string float up into the air and come down perfectly inside the wooden cup.
There was one thing Steve didn’t know, though. He didn’t know who would make these traditional toys once he and his wife were gone.
“How will it play out? We don’t know yet,” he said in a 2019 interview with Inside Appalachia. “The reality of the situation is we are manufacturing in America. Look around you. There’s a lot of competition.”
A year after that interview, Ellie died of lung cancer. A year after her death, Steve died from leukemia. That left the business in the hands of their son Terra.
Zack Harold
/
West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Steve and Ellie Conlon purchased the Mountain Craft Shop Co. in 2002 from its founder Dick Schnake.
“Terra — it’s Latin for ‘earth,’” he said. “I was an earth child, born on the living room floor.”
Terra lives in San Francisco now, where he’s a computer programmer. He tried to run the business from afar since his parents’ passing but it hasn’t really worked. The company lost money last year. So he decided to try and sell — but that didn’t work out either. At least, not the way Terra wanted.
“I had buyers that were interested in the businesses in Pennsylvania or New York. And ideally I wanted to keep it in the location,” he said.
Mountain Craft Shop Co. is so tied to Wetzel County — so tied to West Virginia — that even the wood used to make the toys comes from local trees that Terra’s dad would cut, mill and dry himself.
One day, while Terra was back in the Mountain State trying to wrap up his parents’ affairs, Fred Goddard stopped by. Goddard is a minister who lives just a few miles up the road.
“I saw some things for sale and I thought, ‘That would be handy on the farm,’” he said. “So I pulled in and [Terra] began to talk about the toy store and I began to share my memories with him.”
It turns out Goddard’s relationship with these toys goes back even farther than Terra’s — and even farther than Terra’s parents. Steve and Ellie Conlon were not the Mountain Craft Shop Co.’s original owners. They bought it in 2002 from its founder, Dick Schnake. He started the company in the mid-1960s. He was a mechanical engineer by trade but didn’t manufacture the toys himself. Schnake handled research and development and farmed out manufacturing to a staff of artisans.
But Schnake displayed his toys in a little showroom near his home, where shoppers could take them for a test drive. Goddard’s mother used to take him to that toy store when he was a little boy.
“Dick would stand and talk for hours,” Goddard said. “He would explain how the toys were made. He wanted us to see every toy in the store, not just what we were interested in. He wanted to show us everything.”
Zack Harold
/
West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Traditional wooden folk toys manufactured at the Mountain Craft Shop Co. in Proctor, West Virginia. The toys can be found at craft fairs and gift shops all over Appalachia.
Goddard doesn’t only have memories — he still has some of the toys his mother purchased from Schnake.
“I have a rubber band gun. And that one, of course, tended to get me in some trouble around the house,” he said.
As Goddard walked around the Conlons’ shop, Terra floated an idea.
“All of a sudden he said ‘I could sell you this business.’ And I’m thinking ‘No, I could never own this,’” Goddard said. “And he made an offer and I realized, I can’t pass this up.”
The timing was almost too perfect. Goddard lost his wife of 33 years to COVID-19 last December. Since then, he found love again with a widow who lost her husband to COVID-19. They’re engaged now and Goddard’s fiancé, as fate should have it, is an amateur woodworker.
Goddard plans to keep any current employees who want to stay. He also plans to recruit some additional elves to help build toys. The company won’t be able to stay in its current facility but Goddard plans to find a storefront where he can display the toys just like Dick Schnake once did.
Terra says it’s what his parents would’ve wanted.
Zack Harold
/
West Virginia Public Broadcasting
These marble runs are among the many traditional folk toys manufactured by the Mountain Craft Shop Co. They are sold with marbles manufactured by Marble King in nearby Paden City.
“I’m super pumped that not only is it someone in West Virginia, but it’s someone in Wetzel County,” he said. “My mom spent so much time, so much effort, developing the ‘West Virginia grown’ and Mountain State marketing. I like that.”
Fred’s just happy he’ll be able to give kids the same kinds of toys — and the same kinds of memories — he has.
“This area, this state, this country, this world, needs this store,” he said.
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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 out of every 157 people have died from COVID-19 in Wetzel County, according to state health department data.
In northern West Virginia, nestled right below the state’s northern panhandle, is Wetzel County.
It’s small and rural. The Ohio River snakes past the county seat of New Martinsville, birthplace to famed West Virginia University football coach Bill Stewart.
The county is home to around 14,000 people and has experienced the state’s highest rate of death from COVID-19.
One out of every 157 people have died from the virus, according to state health department data.
Carla McBee, the county medical examiner, said the local funeral homes couldn’t keep up with the demand at the height of the pandemic.
“We had funeral homes just having two and three and four funerals a week, which is not normal here,” she said.
McBee also responded to the pandemic as a county commissioner who approved an additional $200,000 in funds to agencies for protective gear. The commission also approved increased funding for the local food pantry to help the increased number of people who were out of work and in need of food, she said.
“We have had a lot of agencies in here saying, ‘Our budget is maxed. Can you assist us with funding?’ And we have,” McBee said.
Ninety-two people have died in Wetzel County from COVID-19 as the county reported another death as the state reached 7,500 deaths from virus.
For comparison, Kanawha, which is the state’s most populated county with more than 180,000 residents and 810 COVID-19 deaths, the death rate is one out of every 223 people.
The rate of death in Wetzel County stretched other agencies to their limit.
Steve Yoho, director of the county’s Office of Emergency Services, said the department stopped planning for natural disasters and emergencies, and instead, focused on helping the health department.
“We helped [the health department] put on the clinics and do testing and do shots,” he said. “Basically, for a two-year period, we didn’t do emergency management and became part of the health department.”
Employees with the Wetzel-Tyler Health Department have been on the front lines of the pandemic, serving a largely elderly population. DHHR data shows around 80 percent of residents 61 and older have been fully vaccinated against the virus.
Health department administrator Ashley Guiler said they didn’t have enough staff to keep up with the state’s requirements for pandemic response.
“The local health departments weren’t provided any funding to allow us to obtain any staff to actually fight COVID-19, so we relied on our community partners to volunteer for us,” Guiler said. “We had a lot of retired nurses, we had a lot of EMS people join us to administer the shots on their days off from their regular jobs.”
The all hands on deck response to the pandemic meant other health department programs like preventative care and women’s health care were stalled for two years, Guiler explained.
“Now on the rebound, we’re seeing an increase in cancer. We’re seeing an increase in chronic diseases,” she said.
The pandemic has impacted Wetzel County in another way, according to McBee, as it overlapped with the county’s problems with substance use disorder.
“I believe our issues are a lot of poverty. We don’t have a lot of jobs in our county. People just don’t see a way out, and they don’t have the finances to get a way out, so they turn to drugs,” she said.
Nationwide, drug overdose deaths accelerated during the pandemic, and in West Virginia, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data showed nearly twice as many people died from an overdose in 2022 compared to 2016.
“Most people tell me they do it because they lack coping skills. I don’t see that getting any better. I just think everything looks bleak, and that’s why people start it,” McBee said.
The West Virginia Judicial Vacancy Advisory Commission is taking applications for two Family Court vacancies. The Second Family Court Circuit serves Marshall, Tyler and Wetzel counties. The Ninth Family Court Circuit serves Logan County.
The West Virginia Judicial Vacancy Advisory Commission is taking applications for two Family Court vacancies.
The Second Family Court Circuit serves Marshall, Tyler and Wetzel counties. The Ninth Family Court Circuit serves Logan County.
The deadline for completed applications and letters of recommendation is July 13. They should be submitted by email to JVAC@wv.gov or by mail to the commission, c/o Office of the General Counsel to the Governor, Office of the Governor, State Capitol, 1900 Kanawha Blvd. E, Charleston, WV 25305. More information is available by calling (304) 558-2000.
The earliest record of the St. Joseph Settlement, a community of German Catholic immigrants, dates to June 5, 1853. The settlers originally came from the southern German states of Bavaria and Hesse—areas that opposed Frederick William IV’s absolute monarchy.
They emigrated to the United States and settled St. Joseph on the hills above the Ohio River on the Marshall-Wetzel county border.
The first school was built of hewn logs in 1854 and served as both a school and chapel until 1856, when the first church was built. The church and schoolhouse—along with a rectory, community building, and cemetery—are still the heart of the St. Joseph community.
St. Joseph reached its heyday during the Ohio River Valley oil and gas boom of the late 19th century. Small stores popped up throughout the area, and the settlement expanded to nearly 50 square miles.
Students at St. Joseph were taught both German and English well into the 20th century, and some German words and phrases are still in use. St. Joseph’s old church is still in use, and its schoolhouse is a public library and parish museum.
The last Disaster Recovery Center serving communities in northern West Virginia after devastating flash floods this summer will close this week.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Recovery Center in Wetzel County will close at 6:00 p.m. Friday evening, September 29.
The center, located at Hundred High School, opened after flooding in July devastated several communities in northern West Virginia.
Although the center is closing, flood victims can still register with FEMA by phone or online until October 17th.
Just over 800 people have registered for aid so far, and nearly $2.5 million has been granted to individuals throughout the region.
More information:
Survivors can register by calling the FEMA helpline at 800-621-3362 (FEMA) from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. seven days a week. Those who use 711 or Video Relay Service can call the same helpline. Persons who are deaf, hard of hearing or have a speech disability and use a TTY, should call 800-462-7585. Survivors with general questions or questions about their applications are encouraged to call the helpline or visit: www.DisasterAssistance.gov.
The number for the U.S. Small Business Administration Disaster Assistance Customer Service Center is 800-659-2955. Deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals may call 800-877-8339. For disaster program information visit SBA.gov/disaster.
Address and hours of operations until closing:
Wetzel County
Hundred High School Library
Hundred High School, 3490 Hornet Highway, Hundred, WV 26575
Monday through Friday (the last day) 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.
