W.Va. Flooding Long-Term Recovery Groups Remain Unfunded

West Virginia created the State Resiliency Office (SRO) in 2021 after devastating floods in 2016, to update the state’s decades-old statewide flooding plan and be better prepared next time. But the state legislature has not funded that plan nor its updates.

The director of the SRO Robert Martin told the Joint Legislative Committee on Flooding last month that the office has focused on grants and collaborations on smaller projects. One such effort was to support long-term recovery groups, local organizations that “encourage community participation and the pooling together of resources to get the most out of the recovery effort,” according to the National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster.

“We know that following 2016, long term recovery groups sprung up everywhere, and they existed for a number of years, but they’ve all fallen off,” Martin told the committee on Nov. 10. “There’s very few of them that exist today.” 

One of those long-term recovery groups that fell off was in Greenbrier County. Twenty-three people died in the 2016 floods, 15 of whom lived in Greenbrier County.

“It breaks my heart on an almost daily basis to know that the group that I put five years of my life into doesn’t exist anymore,” Kayla McCoy, development director for the Greenbrier Long Term Recovery Committee from its start after the 2016 floods to its end in 2021, said.

“We organized really quickly, because we wanted to be able to capitalize on the national attention in the immediate aftermath of that flood, we understood that we had a narrow window to capture dollars and volunteers.”

The group provided supplies, connected community members with government and non government resources, and recruited volunteers to help rebuild the area.

“I think that as West Virginians and as Appalachians, we just get to work whenever there’s a problem before us, we roll up our sleeves and we dive right in,” McCoy said. “There was never this idea of somebody needs to do something. There was this sense of we are going to do something.”

And the group continued after the flooding and expanded to respond to other disasters. When the pandemic hit in 2020, the group was already organized, ready to host vaccine clinics and distribute groceries during the pandemic.

McCoy said that existing local infrastructure meant resources could quickly get to community members.

“I think it’s incredibly important that people who live in communities are affected by that, are affected by disaster, are the ones that are empowered with the tools that they need to recover from that,” McCoy said.

But those early funds stagnated and staffing was scarce. In 2021, the group dissolved.

However, McCoy continued in a personal capacity, for some time attending legislative flooding committee meetings. She says she is still concerned about flooding preparedness in the state.

“Because to pretend that West Virginia is not going to be repeatedly subjected to flooding events, and to choose, because it is a choice, because they have a plan in front of them that they can fund, to choose to deprioritize funding preparedness and mitigation efforts in areas of disaster recovery will directly translate to a loss of human life in West Virginia,” McCoy said. “If we don’t fund preparedness and mitigation efforts, people will die.”

She says she doesn’t know what it will take for proper funding to be in place for the next disaster. 

“If 2016 didn’t place preparedness and mitigation efforts at the top of the prioritization list, I don’t know what could,” McCoy said.

FEMA has declared seven more flooding disasters in West Virginia since 2016. This year, the state saw severe flooding in April and August, when one person died in the Eastern Panhandle.

As for the State Resiliency Office’s efforts with long-term recovery groups, Martin told WVPB in an email Dec. 3 that a federal grant for the project “returned from review,” putting the effort on hold.

The Joint Legislative Committee on Flooding will meet again on Monday, Dec. 9.