Two years after Southwest Virginia floods, recovery is slow and pain is all around

BUCHANAN COUNTY, Va.

Yvonne Rife clung to the attic rafters as raging floodwaters swept her mobile home a quarter-mile down Guesses Fork in Appalachian coal country, “a rough, rough ride” that in August 2021 left her black-and-blue from head to toe but grateful to be alive.

An uprooted oak tree lodged in a train trestle stopped the house from rushing farther downstream, a hard landing that allowed rescuers to pull Rife through the roof to safety. But the rough ride was hardly over.

Recovery from that flash flood and a second, which struck the same county in Southwest Virginia just 11 months later, has been as spotty as cellphone service in these mountain hollers.

While Rife, 66, finally got settled in a house built by Mennonite volunteers, her retired coal-miner brother, Larry Dotson, remains stuck in a shack — with a bedridden wife, a disabled son and no prospect for help thanks to a murky deed on the place he had called home for 40 years.

Renters such as Tim Stiltner are in a similar bind, denied government aid even though his family lost everything.

“All we got out with was what we had on,” said Stiltner, 49, who barely escaped the second flood, in July 2022, with his wife and two sons, one of them in a wheelchair. “We still need some help.”

While nonprofits, businesses, neighbors and strangers have stepped up in sometimes extraordinary ways, federal, state and even local authorities have left some Buchanan County flood survivors feeling forgotten. That’s not a new sentiment in this ruggedly beautiful but poor part of the commonwealth, the pointy, left-hand corner on maps that, it’s often noted, is closer to eight other state capitals than to Richmond.

But the sense of abandonment has been especially raw since the Federal Emergency Management Agency denied aid to individuals affected by the twin floods in Buchanan, the only county in the state bordering West Virginia and Kentucky. The salt in that wound: FEMA based its decision on a complicated formula that makes it more difficult for people in poor communities to qualify for help compared with those in wealthier ones — an issue nationwide that the agency’s own advisory council criticized as part of a broader study in 2020.

On Aug. 30, 2021, the remnants of Hurricane Ida dumped 7 inches of rain on Hurley, a tiny community in the northern part of the county, killing an 85-year-old woman, destroying 19 homes and severely damaging about two dozen more, according to a tally by the United Way of Southwest Virginia. Not quite a year later, a storm starting on the night of July 12, 2022, swamped Whitewood and Pilgrim’s Knob, about 20 miles to the south. That flood took no lives but wiped out 21 homes and caused major damage to 25 others.

FEMA helped rebuild public infrastructure such as roads and bridges after both disasters, but the agency turned down two state requests for direct aid to individual homeowners. Appeals to President Biden from Virginia’s two Democratic senators, Mark R. Warner and Tim Kaine, and Rep. H. Morgan Griffith (R-Va.) went nowhere.

FEMA partly based its decision on a dollars-and-cents calculation that makes perfect sense in Washington: The agency figures that states have the wherewithal to help individuals unless the total value of properties lost is enormous. To residents of Buchanan, though, FEMA’s math does not add up: Why would the feds rather bail out the owners of posh beach homes lost to hurricanes, they wonder, than poor mountain people wiped out by floods?

“The person with the $3 million home probably has the resources to go somewhere and get additional lodging more than someone with a $30,000 or $50,000 home — and that’s literally all they have,” said state Sen. Travis Hackworth (R-Tazewell), who grew up in Buchanan and represents the area in Richmond.

Rife thinks they ought to charter buses to Washington with picket signs declaring: “Hillbilly lives matter, too.”

Warner and Kaine have urged FEMA to change its eligibility criteria to better serve rural communities, so far without success.

Eligibility rests not on a firm “dollar amount threshold” but on a combination of factors, including property loss and the state’s financial resources, a FEMA spokesperson said in an email to The Washington Post on Friday. The spokesperson did not respond to questions about how the agency’s approach might disadvantage disaster victims in poor, rural communities.

A 2020 report by FEMA’s National Advisory Council blasted several recovery programs that “provide an additional boost to wealthy homeowners and others with less need, while lower-income individuals and others sink further into poverty after disasters.”

Virginia does have money to help. Ranked among the nation’s 10 richest states, it happens to be awash in black ink at the moment, wrapping up the last fiscal year on June 30 with revenue that exceeded estimates by $5 billion.

At the urging of Del. Will Morefield (R-Tazewell), the General Assembly slipped $11.4 million into its budget early last year for homeowners rebuilding from the first flood. Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) put about the same amount in his proposed budget this year for victims of the second flood, and the sum could swell to $18 million if Morefield and Hackworth get their way.

But a protracted budget standoff in Richmond has held that help hostage. Whenever it’s approved, that money will be for homeowners only. State funding for flood-prevention programs is wrapped up in divisive climate politics. Kaine secured $1.5 million in the draft Senate appropriations bill for the Appalachia Service Project, a nonprofit that has been helping renters and homeowners rebuild in Buchanan. But the final bill has yet to pass.

Unless that money comes through, most renters will be left to their own, frayed bootstraps.

Columbus and Victoria Fleming moved into a rented double-wide in Pilgrim’s Knob as newlyweds two years before the flood. He is a heavy-equipment operator at a mine, and she is an ambulance driver for a non-emergency transport service.

After the disaster, they moved about 20 miles west to the county seat in Grundy, where they are still digging themselves out financially.

“We was renting there, so we didn’t get no help,” said Victoria Fleming, 50, referring to government assistance.

While the couple did receive $500 from the United Way and a handful of $60 Lowe’s gift cards from the county, that is far less than what they needed to make their new place livable.

A friend let the Flemings move into his vacant double-wide in Grundy under a rent-to-own deal for $300 a month — cheaper than the $500 they were paying in Pilgrim’s Knob. But the place was in rough shape, with repairs on the couple’s dime.

With no running water for the first month, they had to shower at the firehouse where Columbus volunteers. To flush the toilet, they relied on a pump and hose they hooked up to a nearby creek.

A year after the flood, they are still ripping out floors and walls and insulation to rid the place of mold, buying sheetrock and other supplies on a payment plan offered by Lowe’s. That is on top of payments they are still making on furniture they bought for their Pilgrim’s Knob home, all of which was destroyed.

They are thankful they survived, thankful for the Grundy double-wide, fixer-upper or not. For the donated furniture. And for the used car that the foreman at the mine where Columbus works just handed over one day, unprompted, like it was nothing.

“We may not have everything,” Victoria Fleming said, “but we have each other, so we’re still holding on.”

At times, though, the Flemings cannot help but feel like they did a year ago when the floodwaters suddenly gushed into their rental. They ripped through the ceiling to reach the rafters, where they waited for help.

“Nobody came to us,” she said.

The pair hung on there for six hours, until the water that at one point reached the collarbone of 6-foot-3 Columbus subsided. They waded out on their own.

Other flood victims count themselves lucky, including Joe and Doris Ward of Pilgrim’s Knob, who, like everyone The Washington Post interviewed, said they could not afford flood insurance. They still marvel over acts of kindness large and small.

“Fella I grew up with, no kin to me, he came by, gave me a Food City gift card for $200,” said Joe Ward, 81. “I didn’t even know he remembered me hardly.”

A woman who teaches school with the Wards’ daughter in a neighboring county put them up temporarily in a trailer. They finally settled permanently in a donated double-wide that is worth more than the cinder block house they lost last year.

Using money from the United Way, they had it moved to property beside their daughter’s house in Honaker, a tiny community in Russell County, about 25 miles south of their old place.

“We’ve just been blessed,” said Doris Ward, 79.

Recovery from major natural disasters is always going to be a long process, said Travis Staton, president and CEO of United Way of Southwest Virginia.

“Typically, 24 to 36 months is a good turn-around,” he said. “Overall, we are making tremendous progress.”

The nonprofit raised about $1 million for Hurley relief, with $850,000 of that “already out the door” to residents, he said. It raised $928,000 for Whitewood and Pilgrim’s Knob, with close to $500,000 of that already distributed.

Much of the money goes into building materials, which volunteer laborers from Mennonite Disaster Service use to build new houses and other groups put into repairs.

“It takes a lot of money to build a house even with volunteers,” Staton said.

Oddly enough, there has been an upside to having back-to-back calamities. Buchanan County set up a long-range rebuilding committee after the first flood and was able to quickly expand its mission to cover the second, said Butch Meredith, construction manager for the Baptist General Association of Virginia, which is coordinating repairs to homes that can be salvaged.

“When Hurley happened, it took two months before any repairs … started,” he said. “When Whitewood happened, it took less than seven days.”

Which is not to say the job is anywhere near done.

“I’ll be the first to admit, everything wasn’t touched,” he said. “There are people that feel that they were overlooked.”

Ten houses used to share a scenic stretch of Dismal River Road along with the tiny Pilgrim’s Knob Post Office.

Just one, situated above an eight-foot basement, survived last year’s flood along with the post office sitting on a rise across the street. That house belongs to Robert Rife, no relation to Yvonne Rife, who was swept with her house down the swollen creek in Hurley.

“I’m one of the few lucky ones,” said Robert Rife, 69, a retired teacher and auto body repairman who has lived on the spot with his wife for 46 years.

It took weeks for Mennonite and Amish church volunteers, working with shovels and wheelbarrows, to clear four feet of mud from his basement. But the rest of his house stayed dry. Even his prized pickup — a teal 1972 Chevy that he managed to move to higher ground — came through without a scratch.

Coal companies with operations in that part of the county quickly cleared the wreckage of destroyed homes and other debris, regraded the land and seeded it with grass. As Rife sat outside one late afternoon this month, taking in the open vista and his vegetable garden full of corn, it was hard to imagine there’d been a flood there, or a neighborhood, for that matter.

It was a far different story on the other side of the county in Hurley. No private companies volunteered to take on demolition, so the job was left to the county. Work began less than two weeks ago — nearly two years after the flood.

Rita Wolford said she had to pester county officials to start removing the splintered shells of trailers, small wood-frame houses and larger split-levels littering the banks of Guesses Fork — eyesores that she feared posed a health risk, given the mold festering on the ruined contents still strewn inside.

“There’s a lot of black mold when the wind blows,” said Wolford, 70, a retired nurse.

Trey Adkins, a county supervisor, was on the scene that day as an excavator tore into the first house, the site of the lone fatality. He said it wasn’t a simple matter for the county to start ripping down ruined houses. The supervisors had just recently passed a resolution, he noted, to approve the use of county equipment for the job.

Wolford lives hundreds of feet above Guesses Fork in one of the area’s grander homes. She shares it with the man she married at age 16, Mike, a 73-year-old former game warden and federal mine inspector who worked his way up to owning several mines with his brothers.

The creek would never rise high enough to reach them, the Wolfords thought as the heavy rain began. And they were right. Yet from the mountains above came a mudslide studded with enormous rocks and trees.

“The trees just came down in bundles,” she said.

There was no damage to the couple’s showstopping, second-floor trophy room, with one wall devoted to taxidermy mounts from an African safari and zebra skin draped over the couch. But their first floor was soaked, their 40-foot swimming pool filled with mud.

The house is cleaned up now, and the pool is converted to a vegetable garden, its diving board still in place at the old deep end. Wolford said her real loss is one that cannot be measured in dollars.

Before the flood, all five of her sisters lived nearby, two within walking distance. They’d gather almost every night after dinner on the “baby” sister’s front porch, right by the house where they had grown up, drinking coffee and chatting.

“We’re all parted now,” said Brenda Blankenship Coleman, 69, one of the sisters, who lost her house and resettled in a double-wide in Grundy with her 50-year-old son, Robbie, who has cerebral palsy. The place is brand-new, decorated in stylish grays and taupes, but she misses Hurley. She hated to leave but could not find any flat land there outside the flood plain.

Both sisters got help from Richmond, but Wolford figures some level of government contributed to the disaster with what she sees as misguided environmental policies. When she was growing up, the families that lived along Guesses Fork would pay somebody from the coalfields or a construction company every two or three years to bring in a big piece of equipment to “dip out” — dredge — the creek.

“And see, they stopped letting them do that because, they said, ‘Okay, we have this salamander, you can’t do that. We have this crawdad,’” she said. “It used to be probably 20 foot deep. It’s not 10 foot deep [now].”

A source of animated debate in Richmond is whether the floods in Buchanan and other parts of Virginia are the result of climate change. Democrats and climate activists have criticized Youngkin for trying to pull out of the greenhouse gas compact known as RGGI.

Virginia panel votes to exit carbon trading market

Part of sweeping environmental legislation that also set a goal of going carbon-free by 2050, RGGI created a carbon cap-and-trade market among states in the Northeast and the Mid-Atlantic. It has raised more than $657 million in revenue for Virginia since early 2021, nearly half of it for flood preparedness. Buchanan was among the first counties to tap the RGGI funding in October 2021, and Southwest Virginia overall has received nearly $3.3 million in grants.

“Every year, more and more Virginians are losing everything they have to floods and extreme weather,” said Mandy Warner, director of climate and clean air policy at the Environmental Defense Fund. “Governor Youngkin’s anti-climate agenda shows a failure to accept basic science and a willful ignorance of his own voters’ well-being.”

Youngkin sees RGGI as a “carbon tax” — one that he says has done nothing to reduce emissions as utilities fully pass on the cost to ratepayers. Rather than relying on RGGI money, he has proposed plowing $200 million in state general funds into the Resilient Virginia revolving loan fund for flood prevention projects.

“We have funding,” he said recently in Richmond, as he prodded legislators to reach a deal on the budget. “We should set it aside and prepare for these kinds of tragedies so that we don’t find ourselves a year later still arguing about whether there should be support of $11 million to go to Buchanan County.”

The RGGI debate seemed beside the point to Adkins, the county supervisor, as he oversaw demolition of the house in Hurley, relatives of the woman who died there looking on solemnly. He wants money to guard against floods, perhaps by rechanneling the creek. He does not care where it comes from.

“It’s going to come from somewhere,” he said. “We’ve had a lot of politicians here, not a lot of action on the creek.”