RICHWOOD, W.Va. — Since 1955, Main Street Motors has been selling used cars out of their little shop along U.S. 39/55 in Nicholas County.
Thursday’s floods in Nicholas County will change that–at least for a little while.
“We’ll rebuild,” Donald “Duck” Perrine said. “We’ll rebuild. We been here 55 years.”
Donald and his family, who help run Main Street Motors, live just across the street from the business. Normally, he said, this isn’t a part of the town that suffers too much from flooding.
“I haven’t suffered right here,” he said. “Just seems like there was a cloud burst right back on this mountain. It just all came at one time. It was just like a big river coming down through here.”
Severe flooding effectively shut down Richwood’s Cherry River Plaza and the vast majority of the downtown area on Thursday. US 39/55 was impassable Friday morning in attempts to reach the downtown area.
“This was about as bad as I’ve ever seen it here in Richwood,” Perrine said. “It’s going to take a lot of time and a lot of help and a lot of volunteers and just going to be a time consuming thing.”
Along US 39, power and clean-up crews began assessing and working in the area Friday morning. In some portions of the area, power lines were hanging in the road or completely uprooted. In several locations along the road, mudslides had thrown an excess of debris into the road.
There are also small patches of localized flooding that have begun to normalize as the Cherry River’s water level begins to recede.
Perrine said, despite the set-back, he wasn’t going to give up on his home or his business.
“We have been in business here since 1955, and we’ll rebuild,” he said. “We’ll get going. The Lord’s been good, and we’ll keep on going.”