Hardest hit is Mingo County, where at least 500 homes have sustained serious damage. It’s the worst flooding southern WV has seen in eight years.
Standing on the bank of Pigeon Creek in Varney, the loudest noise is the water, which some say is higher than it’s ever been. There’s a vehicle and part of a tractor trailer submerged in the creek: just a small example of the damage that’s been done the past couple of days by the rain in Mingo County.
Johnny Hager was looking for the tractor trailer in the creek, which belongs to his neighbor.
His house was spared from the flood water, but he’s been watching the evidence of others’ losses floating down the creek all day.
“I watched 23 bridges come through my place there,” Hager said. “Plus 2000 gallon tanks—2 of them floated down through there. And both of them were loaded down with fuel.”
A ways down the road in Musick Bottom, Rheba Browning is sweeping water off her mother’s porch. Garnette Clarke, is 93 years old and has been living in this house for more than 50 years.
“When a storm comes you’re liable to get anything,” Clarke said.
“You never dreamed you’d see this,” Browning told her mother.
“No, I never.”
Browning and her husband are in their 70s, but there’s no one else to clean the mud from her mother’s house.
Next door, Kim Smith, her brother and her father are surveying her muddied possessions piled in her driveway.
“Starting to clean the mud out,” she said. “Sorting through things, making piles of garbage. Basically everything you have is garbage.”
She’s lived in Musick for nine years. The creek has gotten high before, she says, but not like this. Late Friday night, Smith sat on a neighbor’s porch up the hill from her house, and watched the rising flood waters ruin her home.
“Makes you feel helpless and hopeless but it’s an eerie feeling,” she said. “It always seems like it floods at nighttime in the dark. You can’t really see when the power starts going off and then all you can hear are all the sounds of the metal and the wood and the water. It sounds like a war zone. To me it sounds just like a war zone. It’s scary.
The tone is one of resignation, as people describe what they’ve lost, but there’s anger, too. Though Governor Manchin has activated more than 300 National Guard troops, as of Sunday afternoon no one in Varney had seen any outside aid.
“Basically we’ve been on our own,” said Paul Noe. He’s helping his sister muck out her house.
“What people’s done they’ve done themselves. I’d like to know where FEMA is. I’m very fortunate but there’s a lot of people here who’ve lost everything they’ve got and no way to build back. They’ve lost everything and they need help.”
And Noe points out that for Mingo County, the worst is probably yet to come.
“And each and every time it gets larger,” Noe said. “So the next one will be bigger. The same amount of rain, these creeks just fill in. The water does not have nowhere to go. They’ve done all this mountaintop removal and timber and gas line and all of that, and everything just fills these valleys in.”
The water has gone down for now, but the rivers and creeks throughout the southern part of the state remain swollen. The weather forecast for Varney calls for a 50 percent chance of thunderstorms on Monday.