White Sulphur Springs Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Warmer Climate In W.Va. Equals More Rainfall And More Floods

Curtis Tate spoke with Nicolas Zegre, an associate professor of forest hydrology at West Virginia University, about what’s behind this trend.

Flood events are becoming more frequent and severe in West Virginia, causing millions of dollars in damage to property, disrupting communities and displacing lives.

Curtis Tate spoke with Nicolas Zegre, an associate professor of forest hydrology at West Virginia University (WVU), about what’s behind this trend.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Tate: What makes West Virginia and Appalachia so vulnerable to severe, frequent floods?

Zegre: When we think about floods, in particular West Virginia, we have to think about them two ways. One is what we call a riverine based flood. So the larger rivers that flood when they spill over the stream, the riverbanks onto the floodplain, which of course are normally dry areas. And so when we look at flooding in West Virginia and we see that riverine flooding, there are hot spots in the Eastern Panhandle, where we see a lot of that riverine flooding, and that’s associated with the ridge and valley, the large rivers like the Potomac, that the ridge and valley topography kind of creates these really wide river valleys that provide a floodplain and we certainly have that in other parts of the state. But when we think about hot spots in the state, the Eastern Panhandle, the riverine flooding is a big problem.

But the other type of flooding we’re concerned about in West Virginia is flash flooding. And flash flooding can happen anywhere. It can happen, certainly in our small streams and our heavily dissected headwater valleys where 85 percent of our streams in West Virginia are small streams. And, of course, we know we have people living up and down just about every hollow in West Virginia.

And so we actually have two hot spots, we have a hot spot in the West Fork watershed in that Clarksburg-Bridgeport Harrison County area. And then we also see a flash flooding hot spot kind of central to Kanawha and what we refer to as kind of the southern coalfield counties. Now, that said, flash flooding and riverine flooding does happen everywhere throughout the state. But if we’re thinking about a higher propensity for flash flooding, or for riverine flooding, we do see these emerging trends on where there is a greater probability of them happening.

Tate: So for example, in the 2016 flood disaster in southern West Virginia, was it more the second type?

Zegre: It was actually both. When they started collecting stories of what the 2016 flood looked like, and from the community and the first responder perspectives, and then when we started looking at what the floods look like from a hydrology perspective, what became clear was it was a different type of flood in different parts of the Greenbrier watershed. So around Richwood and Rainelle, for example, that was more a flash flood, a wall of water moving very, very quickly downslope.

Whereas, when you were in the White Sulphur Springs and kind of Lewisburg area, it was more of a riverine flood, where the water, the river level rose and kind of spilled over and filled the wider valley. And what’s interesting, Curtis, is when you start thinking about where the damage was, and vulnerability, and also recovery, we saw very different damage and very different approaches to response and recovery in Rainelle versus White Sulphur Springs. And we can tie that back to the different types of floods. But I should say that, in the case of the 2016 flood, there were a lot of flash floods that routed downstream that also contributed to the larger riverine flood. And so we can have multiple types of floods occurring in the same event, which is going to be related to the topography and the stream channel and what all that looks like.

Tate: What’s driving the heavier rainfall?

Zegre: So heavy rainfalls are the result of a warmer atmosphere. We think of the atmosphere as like a balloon, and if you blow up the balloon in your house in January, and it’s warm inside your house, the balloon is expanded. And if you walk outside, on that cold winter day, that balloon is going to contract, walk back inside to that warm house and then the balloon is going to expand. So that’s what’s happening with warming temperatures in the atmosphere.

With a warmer temperature, the atmosphere expands, which means it can store more water. But with warmer temperatures, there’s more evaporation of water from our soils, in our trees and our rivers and our lakes. And so, more water has been put into the atmosphere and more of that water can be stored in the atmosphere. And once the atmosphere reaches saturation, we have these very heavy intense rainfalls, and so heavy rainfall and air temperature is very clearly related. In fact, for a single one degree temperature increase, a one degree Fahrenheit increase in air temperature, the atmosphere can hold 4 percent more water. And so, as the atmosphere warms, that holds more water, and it creates more rainfall.

Tate: How much does land use, whether commercial, residential or industrial, contribute to the problem?

Zegre: Whether it is, you know, what we would call an old growth forest, or a Walmart parking lot, if you drop eight to 10 inches of rain in a couple of hours, like what was experienced in eastern Kentucky, two summers ago, there’s going to be flooding in it. Our systems just aren’t designed to handle that much water. But land use activities very much affect how quickly water runs off. And so impervious surfaces associated with industrialization, associated with urbanization, and associated with the result of surface mining, all of this routes water more quickly, more water is routed more quickly off that landscape.

And so when we think about how we mitigate these effects of extreme rainfall and flooding, putting our landscape back into forests is a really important part of this conversation. But land use is a really important driver of flooding. But I should also say that, it’s really hard to detect the effects of a single neighborhood or single mine, or a single clear-cut parcel and the effect that, that has on flooding. And so we often think about this, we know how water cycles through the atmosphere and through the earth. And so what happens when you remove forests and remove soils, that water can’t be stored and that water is not removed from runoff, so all of that goes downstream.

Candy Darter Among Endangered Species To Receive Federal Funding

The candy darter is a small fish that lives in the upper Kanawha River Basin in West Virginia and Virginia.

An endangered fish in West Virginia is among 32 species that will benefit from federal funding.

The candy darter is a small fish that lives in the upper Kanawha River Basin in West Virginia and also in Virginia. It’s been listed as an endangered species since 2018.

On Friday, the 50th anniversary of the Endangered Species Act, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced $62 million in funding to help the candy darter and other species recover nationwide.

Rival species are the biggest threat to the candy darter. Unused live bait, when dumped into the streams it inhabits, can breed and outcompete the candy darter for food, habitat and even mates. Pollution and habitat loss have also put pressure on the candy darter.

Last fall, the federal fish hatchery in White Sulphur Springs achieved a milestone when it released hatchery-raised candy darters into the wild, marking the first time that it was done successfully.

Six Years On, Researchers Studying Greenbrier County Flood Resiliency, Response Efforts

Six years have passed since the 2016 flood in southern West Virginia that killed 23 people and ravaged communities like White Sulphur Springs and Rainelle. Despite that, researchers say the state does not have a long-term flood recovery plan.

Reporter Shepherd Snyder spoke with WVU researcher and assistant professor of geography Jamie Shinn on her project studying how residents of Greenbrier County recovered from the flood, and how the results could shape more effective flood responses both at the state and national levels in the future.

Snyder: Getting started, I was wondering if you could tell me about this research project and what the research process will look like.

Shinn: We’ll be focusing on two towns within Greenbrier County: Rainelle and White Sulphur Springs. And we’ll be engaging with community members through a variety of tools. So we’ll do a countywide survey that any resident over the age of 18 is welcome to take, we’ll do some more targeted focus groups with people who were involved in both the response and recovery to the flood as well as impacted by the flood. And then we’ll take some interviews with people at regional, state and national levels who were involved or represent organizations that were involved in flood response and recovery. And our goal in doing that is to answer three research questions.

We’re now several years out from the flood. And yet we know that communities are continuing to deal with the lingering impacts in the recovery process. What we’ve been told by people on the ground is that we have yet to systematically document the lessons learned from the flood, how response in recovery went, what went well, what could have gone better, so that we can better prepare for future floods. And we only need to look as far as Eastern Kentucky in recent months to know that these types of things are likely to happen again in the region. And so we have kind of three overarching goals with the stage one project. The first is to identify gaps in organizational capacity that we can fill to create a more robust flood response and long term recovery. So what do local first responders need to be equipped to respond as quickly and as effectively as possible? What do community and county level groups need? And what do national level groups need? How can we make sure that every group at every scale has the best capacity possible to respond? And then what is the cross-organizational capacity building and coordination that we can do between these groups?

So for instance, in the 2016 flood, we know that all sorts of actors responded, we had voluntary first responders, trained first responders, National Guard, FEMA, Red Cross but also a huge amount of volunteers coming in and faith based organizations. We have the Appalachian service project, we have the Mennonite disaster committee, who spent years in these communities helping to rebuild and respond. Our question is, is there a better way, we can in advance coordinate among these groups to make sure that our response and recovery is as effective and efficient as possible in the future?

The third question that we’re trying to answer is, what knowledge do people need that they don’t have access to, to best plan for these events? And so for that, we’re working with our partners at the West Virginia GIS Technical Center, which is a state organization that’s housed here at WVU, to do a participatory GIS mapping exercise, where these GIS experts are going to present and also build new flood risk tools. So these might look like flood risk maps, or 3D imaging of what a particular part of town will look like under different flood scenarios. We would bring these to the community focus groups and ask people to respond to them (with questions like): “Are they useful? Do they contain the information they need? Are they user friendly?” And then come back to the drawing board and re-create these tools with that feedback in mind.

So the stage two vision that we’ll propose to the National Science Foundation in the spring is to use whatever we learned in stage one through these different methods. So from the survey from the focus groups, from interviews, from the mapping, to build out what we’re calling the West Virginia Flood Resilience Framework. And the vision for the framework is that it will be an online toolkit accessible to anybody to use. This could be for residents, but it could also be for local government agencies, nonprofits or the state resilience office.

Snyder: Can you give me some context for why this project is needed? And why is it getting off the ground now? How are state and local communities currently responding to these types of disasters?

Shinn: I think it’s so place dependent. One thing we’re fairly cautious of in this project is that this will not be a one-solution-fits-all kind of thing. No county, no town is going to respond the same as another because of the particular context of that place. However, we also know that there are broad lessons that we hope we can apply right across the board. One of the reasons we’ve selected both Rainelle and White Sulphur Springs is because they’ve had really different experiences with flood recovery. Arguably, White Sulphur Springs has recovered at a faster and maybe more complete rate than Rainelle. And largely, we think that’s because White Sulphur Springs has a different socioeconomic context. The presence of the Greenbrier and longer term histories of engagement with the tourism economy has made it so that Rainelle was in a more vulnerable position before the flood than White Sulphur Springs was. And so our hypothesis is that that made it harder for Rainelle to recover.

Other work that I’ve done in Rainelle, one thing I’m hearing from people is that while flood recovery was ongoing since 2016, the COVID-19 pandemic came and further slowed that down. So one question that we’re asking is, how do these compounding disasters work together to keep people from making a full and complete recovery, whether that’s Rainelle or a town elsewhere?

Going back to your first part of your question, the project really grows out of some long term research that I’ve been doing in these two towns. I first started to do some research in both of these towns in 2017, just under a year after the flood. And what really struck me coming out of that research was, in many ways, these towns held some very stereotypical story about a vulnerable Appalachian place that we often hear about; vulnerable before the flood, high rates of unemployment, all of the things I think people think they know about this place. But what stood out to me was not that – though those are very real issues of vulnerability, what stood out to me were also the real sources of resilience that I saw in these communities. So the ways in which neighbors came together, through processes of mutual aid, from rescuing each other from their attic, to mucking out a neighbor’s home before they mucking out their own, to people pouring in from surrounding towns and counties to assist strangers, that these stories were born out of hardship, but were quite beautiful. And then also people’s sense of place – their deep ties to their community, and to the place in which they live, and the desire to rebuild these towns that they’re so attached to. And I think those represent real sources of resiliency that we don’t often talk about when we talk about these places.

And so one question I have is: can we leverage these sources of resiliency into our disaster planning? We know that neighbors are going to help each other, we know that people have a deep commitment to their communities and places despite the hardships, despite the vulnerabilities. And how can we craft a response that kind of honors and recognizes that about these places? That’s been a long term question of mine from working in this area since just after the flood, and something that I’ve seen kind of reappear as well throughout the pandemic and ways in which people have responded to that.

Snyder: You specialize in researching social vulnerability and climate change adaptation. How does that perspective affect this research project in particular?

Shinn: Well, we know from climate models that we expect West Virginia to get wetter, we know broadly that we expect more frequent intensity in precipitation events leading to flooding. And so while we hope there’s never a flood, like the one in 2016, we know that statistically, it’s very likely that there will be. So how can we plan ahead for that? How can we work under that reality?

One thing that the West Virginia GIS Technical Center is doing with this project is using those models to think through risk. So you may have been flooded in 2016 and you may have raised your home in accordance with FEMA regulations. And yet, is that enough to protect you from the flood scenarios that we’re seeing from the climate models that we have access to? And in some cases, the answer is yes. But in some cases, the answer is no. And so that’s exactly the type of knowledge we want to give to communities so that they can start to plan for the response to what we think is inevitable increased intensity and frequency of flooding as a result of climate change. And West Virginia is no stranger to flooding, right? This is not a new story. But we expect that this story will become more common in the future.

Snyder: What is the end goal of this project? What are you and your team hoping to achieve? And how do you think this could affect how we prepare for flooding, both in the state, as well as, you mentioned earlier, both local and even national communities in the future?

Shinn: I hope what it does is show us the resources we already have available and how to use them most effectively. And that it shows us the gaps that we need to fill to be able to respond holistically to long term flood response and recovery. And that isn’t just about what happens on the day of a flood or the months that follow the flood. It has to do with making communities more resilient in advance of the flood. One of our key partners on the ground is the metal River Valley Association. And they’re a group that arose out of the 2016 flood and the recovery efforts, but are really geared at building development, economic resiliency in these communities. Because we know that if a community has resiliency in advance of a natural disaster, whether it’s a flood, or a landslide, or a fire or whatever it might be, we know that their capacity to recover from that is higher. And so I think this project will give us very specific information about what the gaps are, and my hope is then that the tools we create out of this will help people to fill those gaps and think through how to do this. And again, in a way that can be very specific to towns and to the state of West Virginia, but I think we’ll have broad relevance as people start to think about disaster response across the country, regardless of what that disaster is.

Katherine Johnson: W.Va.'s NASA Extraordinaire Dies

The West Virginia woman behind much of NASA’s 20th century space accomplishments died Monday at 101 years old.

As an African American woman, Katherine Johnson paved the way for many black, female aerospace workers. In her 33 years at NASA, she helped calculate flight paths by hand for America’s first space mission, as well as the first moon landing.

Johnson was the inspiration for the book and Oscar-nominated film ‘Hidden Figures.’

She grew up in White Sulphur Springs, which was at that time segregated. Black women couldn’t go to school past the eighth grade; however, Johnson finished high school by traveling 130 miles for better education.

She went on to become the point woman for space calculations in NASA’s early years. She was later awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015.

In response to her death, the West Virginia Legislature held a moment of silence Monday. After, democratic lawmakers attempted to revive the “Katherine Johnson Fair Pay Act,” a bill that would have helped West Virginia women negotiate fair and equal pay in the workforce.

“In honor of the great West Virginian and American hero, Mrs. Katherine Johnson, who died today, I’d like to make a motion to discharge House Bill 4885, which is the Katherine Johnson Fair Pay Act, from the Judiciary Committee, which died on Friday,” Delegate Sean Hornbuckle, Cabell County Democrat, said.

If passed, the bill would have made it an unlawful discriminatory practice for an employer to prohibit or retaliate against an employee for disclosing his or her own wages or discussing or inquiring about other employees’ wages. Additionaly, it would have limited employers’ inquiry into a job applicant’s wage and salary history.

Hornbuckle requested the full House revive the Fair Pay Act, which was never considered in its assigned committee.

Hornbuckle’s request failed 58 to 40. In the Senate, a similar request from Bob Beach, Monongalia County Democrat, failed 12 to 21.

**Correction 2/24/20: A previous version did not include the extensive details of House Bill 4885.

Trump to Speak at Military Dinner Ahead of Greenbrier Golf Tournament

President Donald Trump will be in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia for a dinner honoring active-service military personnel and veterans. The dinner, dubbed a “Salute to Service” is scheduled for 6:30 p.m. Tuesday at The Greenbrier.

Trump’s fifth visit to the state as president comes just ahead of the Fourth of July holiday and a PGA golf tournament hosted at the resort owned by Gov. Jim Justice. The tournament, once known as The Greenbrier Classic, was recently renamed A Military Tribute at the Greenbrier.

At an April stop in White Sulphur Springs, the president took aim at Democratic U.S. Senator Joe Manchin on immigration and a no vote on a federal tax reform plan passed last year.

Manchin, a moderate Democrat who is up for reelection this year, is seen a potentially key vote on Trump’s soon to be announced U.S. Supreme Court nominee.

Tuesday’s presidential visit comes just one week after Gov. Justice met with Trump in the Oval Office to discuss plans to revitalize the state’s coal and timber industries.

Trump won West Virginia over Hillary Clinton by more than 40 percentage points in the 2016 presidential election.

West Virginia Resort to Use FanDuel for Sports Wagering

FanDuel will provide interactive sports wagering services at The Greenbrier resort in West Virginia.

The Greenbrier announced Tuesday that New York-based FanDuel will handle retail, online and mobile sports wagering for the resort in White Sulphur Springs.

The resort’s onsite betting will take place at The Casino Club, which is open only to resort guests and event participants, golf and tennis members and Greenbrier Sporting Club members.

West Virginia lawmakers this year approved sports betting at the state’s five casinos and on approved mobile apps, shortly before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a federal law that had banned most sports betting.

The state Lottery Commission approved sports betting rules last week. The goal is to have sports betting underway by the start of football season in September.