CLENDENIN, W.Va. — A Clendenin resident who owns multiple businesses destroyed in last month’s flood is one of several in the northern Kanawha County Elk River community who don’t quite know what to do next.
Bill Ore owns five buildings in the city, including a pharmacy, and FEMA hasn’t lifted a finger to help him with damages to any of them.
“I’m just really upset with FEMA. I think they’re a joke,” he told Hoppy Kercheval on MetroNews “Talkline” Wednesday. “They won’t help business. They won’t remove the trash from the street for a business.”
On Tuesday night in Clendenin, the U.S. Small Business Administration hosted a meeting at the town hall to explain the protocol for a loan application through the SBA. But Ore said he’s not convinced that would be a solution.
“I don’t know if I’m prepared at my age to go into debt and stick it all on my children to make it,” he said.
Ore said almost everyone in Clendenin didn’t have flood insurance because a high water event like the flood that was seen on June 23 was so rare and unexpected.
“It had been a hundred years since we had a flood,” Ore said.
House Speaker Tim Armstead sent a letter Tuesday asking Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin to add small business aid to the agenda of a special session on flood relief that will likely come in August or September.
“What happened to them is not something anybody could have anticipated,” said Armstead. “This is a tremendous tragedy. If there’s a time that the government should be helping businesses make it, it’s a time like this.”
Clendenin is like a ghost town at present, Ore said, and something needs to be done.
“We’re devastated. We have no churches. We have nothing; no banks, no grocery stores; we have nothing,” he said. “I just think they should be putting more help in here to get people started again, but it doesn’t look like they’re going to.”
The owners of several dozen Clendenin-area businesses and their families, as well as Armstead, attended Tuesday night’s SBA information session.