CHARLESTON, W.Va. — The jagged earth at West Virginia’s largest airport still sits high above several homes on Charleston’s Keystone Drive.
On March 12, 2015, a massive hillside collapsed at Yeager Airport’s overrun area, pushing tons of dirt and debris through several buildings. The slide destroyed the Keystone Apostolic Church and damaged homes in the area due to flooding from a dam across the Elk Two Mile Creek.
James Chessor, the church’s pastor, has been going through some old pictures and files this week ahead of Saturday’s one year anniversary. He said he’ll never forget that day.
“It didn’t really feel like reality to be honest. It felt like a nightmare,” he said.
But the collapse was no surprise to Kanawha County officials, according to C.W. Sigman, the deputy director of the county’s Office of Emergency Services.
Sigman said they got a call from the airport officials saying they noticed a difference in elevation to the EMAS system just a few days before the collapse. EMAS stands for Emergency Materials Arresting System which is designed to stop a plane in an emergency situation.
“We went up there to look at it and saw that it did have cracks in it and it did have some issues,” he said. “We had been on top of it, over looking the hill, trying to get an idea of how bad it would be and about an hour later it collapsed.”
Chessor said when he got word of the collapse, he made sure to hurry back to Keystone Drive.
“I stood on one end and looked with binoculars and I could see when it reached the front of the church,” he said. “I just sat there and watched it and heard the sounds of it (the church) being crushed.”
Airport officials reported residents of 25 homes were impacted in the aftermath of the slope failure that occurred at the end of the airport’s runway. A number of those people were displaced for months.
“There’s so much positive that have come out even though there’s been a lot of negative with the loss of the building, but it definitely brought our people together,” Chessor said.
“Luckily, they got people out of the way,” Sigman said. “I can’t say that enough.”
Weather worries remained on the minds of emergency officials that day, but the slope fell before rain arrived.
Sigman said even though they had concerns with the rain in other parts of the county, the airport’s situation still remained a priority.
“The airport needed pumps? We got pumps. They needed generators? We got generators. Anything they needed, we assisted the airport folks,” he said.
“They were proactive, didn’t deny it, started taking action for safety,” he added.
One year later, crews are still working to remove material from the site. The rest of the cleanup could take another 6 to 8 weeks. That means design plans to rebuild the hillside won’t be discussed until later this year — if the airport receives enough funding to do the work.