Rev. Brad Davis has to enter his house in Welch in McDowell County via the basement as repairs are made. Last February, flood waters spilled out of the banks of the Tug Fork River and completely filled Davis’ basement.
Now, light peeks in from the slats of the subfloor above, exposed after being stripped back. Even getting to this point has been a struggle, in part, because of the region’s pre-existing issues with clean water.
“As you can imagine, cleaning up after a flood with dirty water is a difficult task,” Davis said. “Trying to spray stuff off that’s covered in flood mud with black and orange and brown water is difficult.”
What was once the kitchen is now empty of appliances destroyed in the flood, but there’s a calendar on the wall. It’s still hung on February, a totem of the moment things went awry.
On February 16, the Tug Fork River outside of Welch crested at just over 22 feet, tied for its highest recorded level, according to federal river gauges. Fourteen counties in West Virginia were impacted. Just down the road from Davis’ home, three people died when their truck was swept off the road by floodwaters.
Six months on, communities across the region are struggling to recover or at best, living with the realities that the flood has left behind. Community members like Davis say a lot of help was quick to arrive from volunteers and donations, but federal and state assistance hasn’t been enough.
"Before the flood, people here would tell you that this is a forgotten place, an abandoned place. That those in power, those in charge have, in effect, turned their backs on us,” Davis said. “I think the state’s response to the flooding kind of reinforced that.”
At the state level, the West Virginia National Guard was activated. As many as 350 service members were employed in response efforts including swift water rescues and debris removal. But a news article on the Guard’s own website titled ‘West Virginia National Guard reflects on flood response efforts’ seems to imply their involvement in the region had concluded by the article’s publication on March 28.
Close to $40 million in Individual & Households Program Dollars have been approved as of Aug. 18, according to Federal Emergency Management Agency data. But of the 14 counties that were flood impacted in West Virginia, only seven were approved for federal individual assistance. A dozen were approved for public individual assistance, but some residents say that’s not been enough.
The state legislature, which began meeting three days before the flood, considered three bills related to flooding all session. None of them advanced beyond committee.
Given the rural nature of impacted communities and the damage, Davis said things as simple as sourcing materials has slowed recovery to a crawl.
“It’s depressing because it feels very much stagnant,” Davis said. “One of the issues, and I’m far from alone in this, but contractors are few and far between here anyway, they’re hard to come by. And the ones that are here, particularly the ones that are really good, are just completely booked up solid.”
Outside Davis’ kitchen window, the Tug Fork River burbles along, no longer a threat. But the memories persist.
“It’s traumatic. And I think almost everyone here would probably tell you the same thing, that every time a storm rolls through now, it scares people,” David said. “I know I’ve talked to my neighbor, who lives across the street, and she talked about the first major storm that came after the flood, she was in tears because she was so scared that it was going to happen again.”
Heading out of town on the Black Diamond Highway, the road narrows to a single lane. The southbound lane washed out in the flood, exposing piping and conduit on the Tug Fork’s embankment.
Farther down the road in the town of Gary, residents like Wesley Hurt are left wondering how to fix their homes. With his claim to FEMA rejected three times, Hurt has resorted to doing what he can, like covering his house in tarps.
“We can’t even live in our house because I got the whole house stripped, all the drywall down,” he said. “We already bought drywall to put back up. I can’t get nobody to put it up.”
Down the road from Hurt, seven homes remain cut off from the world. The bridge connecting Sunburst Drive collapsed during the flooding, sandwiched between a bend in the Tug Fork River and the train tracks.
Residents like 77-year-old Dolores Johnson have to hike out along the tracks. Johnson said she has to carry changes of clothes with her whenever she leaves the house, in case she has to go to a work event or if she can’t make the walk back home.
“I’ve been walking ever since February the 15th,” she said. “The only way we can get in and out is for me, personally, to walk a mile in and a mile out.”
Johnson said replacing the bridge is caught in a political quagmire.
“They said that it was a private bridge,” she said. “I told them, the private bridge is gone. We need a public bridge so the public can get in and out to us and we can get out of there.”
Sydney Tatum is a photographer based in Tazewell, Virginia, just across the southern border of McDowell County. She spent the days and now months after the flood bringing supplies and resources into the county, and said the lush summer foliage hides a lot of the physical scars left on the landscape.
“When it was still winter, it was really rough to look at,” she said. “There’s a lot of debris that’s still along the rivers. There’s some sheds on their sides. ATVs are down in the river that had been washed away.”
Tatum said she is grateful for those who came from as far afield as New Jersey to lend a hand in the cleanup efforts, but she also recognizes that many of the smaller communities across the region, tucked away in shady hollers with no cell service, have yet to receive even a fraction of the attention places like Welch attracted. She said she knows of some houses that have yet to be cleaned out. And Tatum doesn’t know if they ever will be, as they belong to elderly who just weren’t able to get into them.
“A lot of these people who had flood damage didn’t qualify for FEMA assistance, and so what little income they do have is going to get the house back into a repaired state,” she said. “And so that makes getting groceries hard. Food donations are still very much needed.”
Sen. Rollan Roberts, R-Raleigh, acknowledges the frustration around stalled recovery efforts.
“We’re beyond the flood long enough that it is creating some frustration, not so much for us here in Raleigh County as it is some of our other southern neighbors,” he said.
But Roberts said elected officials will have to wait until they’re back together and in committee to take serious action on any issue.
“Because we are all scattered around, I don’t think there will be any real collaboration until we get into Charleston in the September interims, and these things begin to be dealt with within our committee structure,” he said. “That’s when, when there will be the legislative discussions.”
Davis points out the flood happened just a few days into the state’s regular legislative session, and to the average person it seems that there are funds to help.
“From my understanding, we have something like $2.3 billion in the rainy day fund in the state,” he said. “If we can’t use that money for an actual rainy day, the rainiest of days that causes catastrophic flooding, to help us recover from it, then why do we have one?”
Davis said that leaves communities to fend for themselves, something they’ve already had to practice a lot.
“That’s one of the things that the flood has really underscored, really highlighted. Nobody is coming to save us,” he said. “It’s up to us, and through God’s grace, we are going to make it through this, and we’re going to rebuild, and we’re going to be here, and we’re going to be a community standing together, moving into the future.”
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