WRAINELLE — Tim Fitzwater stood on the railroad tracks behind his home in the pouring rain, just feet from the surging Meadow River, as he watched his neighbors and their homes wash away along with everything he had.
The Greenbrier County resident was witness to one of the worst portions of flooding in West Virginia Thursday, as an unrelenting rainfall swamped dozens of communities and killed at least 25 people in the state — at least four of whom lived directly across the river from Fitzwater.
The bridge that had connected Fitzwater’s neighbors’ homes to the main road, just north of Rupert, was washed away and with it went their hopes of escape.
From his vantage of point, Fitzwater watched as his garage was pulled from the concrete, his home was pushed from its foundation and his neighbor’s trailer was picked up and swept down river with her inside.
On Sunday, Fitzwater traversed the wreckage of his home, his auto repair shop and his vehicle salvage yard that he has worked hard to create in recent years.
All of the cars that had sat on the grassy yard behind his home days before were in heaps downriver. Some were piled three high, bent around the maple trees they had slammed into. Others were filled and buried with the sand that the raging river had left behind.
“There’s a Mailbu,” Fitzwater said, as he walked over car batteries, tools and air compressor hoses. “There’s a Cavalier buried. I got another Cavalier on the other side of that tree.”
Like many people in Nicholas and Greenbrier counties, Fitzwater has been left picking up the pieces. The business he had made for himself is gone. “I watched my whole dream go down,” he said.
Still, Fitzwater was lucky enough to come away from the record flooding with his life. Many others along the short stretch of the Meadow River, near Rupert and Rainelle, weren’t so lucky.
On Sunday, people throughout the small riverside towns continued to recover from the devastation and death they witnessed days before.
In parts of Rainelle, the smell of diesel and propane still hung heavy in the air. Outside Rupert, an entire house covered half of a roadway — a garden hose still dangling from the side. Elsewhere, cars were piled on railroad tracks and canned goods and bread from the food pantry at a Baptist church were abandoned behind the building, left to cook in the hot sun.
The people of those rural communities were busy cleaning up, mourning the loss of their homes and businesses and reflecting on the neighbors they lost and how lucky they were.
Some were still haunted by the screams for help that they had heard, and even more troubled by the silence that followed.
David Hall’s hand was still sore from three nights before.
As the Meadow River surged behind the home he had rented and was repairing Thursday evening, the 64-year-old Hall and Martha Adkins, the woman he was living with, had to flee for their lives.
They fled out their back door and fought their way to the neighboring house that sat on slightly higher ground. But when he got to the other back porch, the door was locked.
That was when Hall used his fist to punch in the lock.
“I had to or we would have died right over there,” he said, as he stood next to the still swollen river Sunday.
But that wasn’t the end of their dance with death. The river kept rising and as it did, both of them clung to a mattress in their neighbor’s abandoned home.
After six hours, Hall and Adkins were lying on the mattress face to face with the ceiling, and the water continued to rise. So Hall began punching again, furiously pounding at the ceiling with his fist.
Hall failed to break through the ceiling, but luckily the water began to recede, sparing two lives with it.
Bill Bell stood in Rainelle Appliance among the $200,000 worth of refrigerators, washers, dryers and kitchen stoves that were ruined when water washed into his business.
In total, Bell estimated he lost more than $1 million in assets from the three businesses and rental properties that he owned along the main stretch in Rainelle. Much of it was likely unsalvageable.
“I lost five vehicles,” he said, as he stood in the mud-strewn showroom. “It’s terrible. It’s hard to talk about. I got squat left.”
On Thursday night, as the water rose, Bell tried desperately to save what he could. He stacked 26 of the new $600 washers on the older units in the laundromat he owns next door. He piled blankets and bags of wood pellets at the double doors at the front of store. He tried to fend off the water by using a Shop Vac to pump it out.
But when the muddy water crept through the back door and up through the floor of the accompanying laundromat, there was nothing that could be done. He retreated with his family to the apartments above to wait out the flood.
“Life as we knew it Thursday doesn’t exist,” he said.
Brenda and Ourbey Hull were trapped in their home for hours. As the waters lapped at the stairs in their living room, they sheltered upstairs, waiting for rescue. Both were unsure if they would make it out.
It wasn’t until hours later that a rescue raft floated across the fence in their front yard and pulled the couple and Brenda’s son from the enveloped home. One by one the family climbed through windows and onto the rafts.
“It was black as an ace of spades out here,” Ourbey Hull said, as he reflected on the still-fresh memory of Thursday night.
Sunday was the first time Ourbey Hull got to see what was left of the rent-to-own property, where they have built their lives for the past three years.
He threw his soaked furniture into the yard. The television and electric fireplace in the living room were worthless. But in the corner of the room, the family’s pet goldfish continued to swim inside the tank that had been picked up during the flooding and set back in place when the waters receded.
The Hulls aren’t sure how they will start again. But they weren’t worried about the material damage. It was the personal loss that gnawed at them more. Ourbey Hull found out only days before that three of his relatives were among the dead found in White Sulphur Springs.
“Everything else can be replaced,” he said. “It’s just material stuff.”
Brian Day was working the first day of his new job for Kanawha Trucking when he got the call telling him that the little Sewell Creek had just broken its banks. He was more than five hours away in North Carolina, with no way to help his wife and three young daughters.
It was up to Pearl Day to save her family from their modest home, less than a block from a swelling stream. She wasted no time. She moved her vehicle to the road and waded through the water with each daughter as they clung to her, pleading with her to save their stuffed animals.
On Sunday, she broke down thinking about it. The family had resolved to make a new life elsewhere — somewhere rising water could never reach them again.
“I’m not coming back,” said Brian Day, as he stood next to his heavily damaged home. “I’m done.”
Jason Smith spent Sunday morning on his front porch, which was rebuilt just two weeks ago. The remnants of his family’s home — the carpeting, most of the furniture and his children’s toys — were in the front yard. All of it was ruined.
Smith did what he could to save his property before the flood waters completely enveloped his $65,000 home. He used caulking to completely seal off his back door. It was all for naught. The water was unstoppable. It found its way up through the heating vents in his floor.
The swingset in his backyard was upset. A piece of someone else’s home was left sitting on the corner of the fence.
“They need to come get their stuff. It’s making my yard look like crap,” Smith said jokingly, as he sat among the heaps of garbage bags. “All you can do is laugh. You probably think I am crazy, but that’s all you can do.”
James McCormick stood on his front porch in a tank top and overalls, Sunday. It was the same spot where he stood two days before, shivering in the cold water that was up to his hips.
The water came out of nowhere, he said, and as the turbulent stream enveloped his community, McCormick sat by helplessly as some of his neighbors died in their homes and others were washed downstream.
“I’ve never heard so many desperate screams for help,” he said Sunday as he recounted Thursday night and Friday morning. “I’m still in shock.”
One of McCormick’s elderly neighbors was caught in the swift current Thursday and carried half a block until she was able to cling to nearby hedges, he said. That is where she remained for several hours until rescuers — of which there were too few — were able to get to her.
All McCormick could do was yell to her, as she fought to keep her head above the water that was filled with debris and floating tanks of propane.
A few houses down, John and Ginger Ferrell were pulling the appliances and furniture from what used to be their home. John and his sister Elizabeth Ferrell struggled as they tumbled a refrigerator full of what was $700 worth of food, now rotting, out of the home.
But they were lucky to even be there. Both of them had been sucked downriver Thursday night as they tried to salvage some of their personal belongings and their children’s medication.
As the river ripped both of them downstream, John Ferrell was somehow able to pull him and his wife to safety. They rode out the rest of the storm on the top of a dugout at the nearby little league field.
Though they had been in contact with authorities, both of their names remained on the list of missing persons — a striking reminder of what almost was.
Reach Andrew Brown at [email protected], 304-348-5104 or follow @Andy_Ed_Brown on Twitter.
This story has been corrected: An earlier version incorrectly identified Jason Smith as another Rainelle resident, Michael Brown.
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©2016 The Charleston Gazette (Charleston, W.Va.)
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