BELVA, W.Va. — A town of less than 100 people near the Nicholas County border likely took on as much or more than eleven feet of water in some places last week, and as of Wednesday afternoon were still trying to drain feet of it out of some backyards.
While the town had no injuries, what they witnessed and experienced last week has some considering whether it’s time to move away from the Gauley River.
“I’d like to stay,” Belva native James Waldeck II said. “If you have to do it, you have to do it. It’s a lot of work to try and rebuild. Even in the Church and everything else through here, everything has to be ripped out back to concrete.”
The majority of the unincorporated community lies along Rt. 39 in Nicholas County as it edges closer to the Gauley River. Melissa Johnston moved to Belva–where her husband grew up–with their kids more than a decade ago. When the Gauley River began to flow over it’s embankment, she didn’t think there was anywhere to find safety.
“There was no way out of it,” she said. “The closest thing we could find was higher ground.”
Johnston and her family receded into the mountain as quickly as they could–watching helplessly as the flood waters swirled around their home.
“The water from the river over there just came pouring slowly across through the other side of the tracks,” she said. “Every little bit of it just kept rising and rising and rising. It got over here to this embankment and it just flowed quickly.”
“It just kind of looked like the ocean, and it just swarmed in. And it just didn’t go back.”
Bible Baptist Church took damage in it’s basement, but Waldeck and a few others in town have been storing supplies in areas where the water didn’t reach.
“We normally can’t see it from over here,” he said. “It did rise up. We could see it. We were shocked at that. Then it started coming over, and eventually it just ran all the way across the road and filled up the backyard. We ended up with 11 feet in the deepest parts of the backyard with nowhere to drain it.”
“People have lived here for 60 or 80 years, no one’s ever seen anything like this,” he said. “But the town’s really come together. Everyone’s helping each other out.”
The flood also did damage–potentially numbering in the millions–to a nearby business that builds mining equipment.
“All the welders, the forklifts, bobcats, and everything was under water,” Stephen Johnson, a welder at Auxier Welding, Inc., said.
Johnson has worked at Auxier for 15 years. Auxier has been in Belva since 1988. Johnson said the last flood to hit Belva with such ferocity may pre-date Auxier by more than 50 years.
“They said in 1932 the water come over this bridge here,” he said. “That’s how long it’s been since it flooded.”
Nicholas County was one of three initial counties–including Greenbrier and Kanawha–to be declared a federal disaster. Ten counties in total have been declared as the clean-up process continues.