Water came from above and below
Rockefeller suspects logging made floods worse in Coalwood
Tuesday May 7, 2002

By Tara Tuckwiller
STAFF WRITER

COALWOOD - "The interesting question," Sen. Jay Rockefeller said Monday after touring flood-wrecked McDowell County, "is the effect of timbering."

Thursday's flooding killed six people in the region, including a woman in nearby Iaeger who died of respiratory problems when an ambulance couldn't reach her, authorities confirmed Monday.

The high water also damaged or destroyed 2,400 homes and businesses in McDowell, Mercer, Mingo and Wyoming counties, according to estimates released Monday. About 2,000 of those were in McDowell County.

"Some people say their houses were flooded and they had no timbering going on behind their houses," said Rockefeller, D-W.Va., as he ended his tour in wiped-out Coalwood. "But there seem to be a lot more, for example, around here, where [timbering] wasn't going on before."

Coalwood residents said they got a double-whammy of water: It rose from the creeks behind their houses, and it crashed down the recently logged mountainsides in front of them. It had never done that before, they said.

Rockefeller suspects logging made the recent flooding so much worse than the 1977 flood in McDowell County.

"I think it's part of it, but I don't know that," he said. "Most people here [think so]. And most of the people who I've worked with for 30 years do."

Parts of McDowell got 5 inches of rain in six hours Thursday, Rockefeller noted. Some flooding was unavoidable.

But without logging to strip mountainsides and leave branches and logs to clog streams and crash through people's houses, he wondered, "Would it have done as much damage?"

All over McDowell County on Monday, people had to leave their mud-filled houses and head back to work, but their labors over the weekend were obvious.

Banks of mud and debris up to 4 feet high lined roadside after roadside, like snowdrifts that will never melt. The foul-smelling mud has dried on anything in a sunny spot, and now every breeze kicks up a choking cloud of dirt.

In Welch, big machinery scooped up giant clots of mud slurry and poured them into dump trucks all day. You still can't drive on the street. At 5 p.m., traffic was backed up literally for miles in four directions as everyone drove, one at a time, through a miraculously dry hardware store parking lot to get through downtown.

The Red Cross is delivering hot meals to people who need them. Senate Majority Leader Truman Chafin, D-Mingo, gave bottled water he had previously ordered for his re-election campaign to people in the flooded areas, campaign manager Tina Goodwin said Monday.

The labels on the bottles have a picture of the candidate and say "Truman Chafin for WV State Senate."

Goodwin said Chafin had ordered the 8-ounce bottles from Allegheny Products Inc. at Sweet Springs earlier this year, and had planned to give them away at fairs and festivals for the general election campaign.

McDowell County Commissioner Gordon Lambert asked Chafin if he could give out the bottled water after the flooding.

"My understanding is he is probably going to order more for people who need water," Goodwin said.

The state has $2 million from Gov. Bob Wise's contingency fund to spend on immediate help. Another $1.3 million will go to help businesses recover.

The Legislature may tap into the state's Rainy Day Fund, said Keith Burdette, Wise's legislative director. But he said the administration won't know if that's needed until damage estimates are complete.

Coalwood can show you some damage. In the West New Camp neighborhood, a man spent Monday shoveling semisolid mud - the best fill material available - into gaping pits around the elderly neighbor lady's porch, and against her foundation to try to stanch the flow of the river that still rushed swiftly down what was once the road.

In nearby Frog Level hollow, the floodwaters actually covered the housetops. The deadly current ripped out chain-link fences, twisted them around themselves and spat them out in mangled heaps all over the neighborhood.

The water was so strong it tore up chunks of sod cleanly by the roots. It sheared off the surface of the road. The road is gone, people's yards are gone - literally swept away, not just covered with mud. All that's left is a little strip of roadbed between two cavernous ditches full of broken hardtop.

"It's a nightmare," said Victoria Noble, as fat drops began to fall on the heap of filthy carpet and furniture that was once the insides of her house. "And here comes the rain."