WHEELING, W.Va. — The Wheeling-based Mt. Zion Cemetery Corporation received a $2 million check from Gov. Jim Justice Thursday to help with repairs following a mudslide that damaged as many as 150 headstones after heavy rains earlier this month.
Del. Shawn Fluharty, D-Ohio, was one of the first lawmakers involved the day following the incident, also the same day U.S. Senator Joe Manchin was making a scheduled visit. Fluharty started the ball rolling with that conversation and another at the state level.
“We knew from the very beginning that this was going to be more than a few volunteers with shovels heading up the hill,” Fluharty said. “This is going to take a lot of heavy lifting; it’s going to be a major project.”
The cemetery, which has the graves of hundreds of veterans including those from the Civil War, has been maintained since 2015 by the Mt. Zion Cemetery Corporation, a non-profit led by President Charles Yocke and Secretary/Treasurer Paula Stein. Those two have a cadre of different volunteers and businesses that are prepared to help make repairs.
Yocke said a Morgantown-based engineering firm is working with them to fix an unstable area above the slide site. Before any major repair work can be done, the surrounding area has to be stabilized for the safety of the workers.
“We’re trying to get a contractor up there to fix the slip because it is still ready to come down,” Yocke said. “It’s like a “V” up there all bottled up.”
The next step will be to identify what headstones have been moved. The conditions have not permitted an investigation into what headstones have been damaged, how many are damaged, and how extensive repairs will be.
“We’ll go along each side of the pile to find the markers and zero in to try to find out what moved,” Yocke said.
A company that specializes in this type of work has given a price range of $1 million to $1.5 million to repair the headstones and reset them on new footers. The process involves finding the pieces, taking them to another location to be reassembled, and returning to the cemetery to be reset.
“They would dig the footers and remount them, and that whole process will take about a year,” Yocke said.
Yocked said the help of Fluharty and State Senator Ryan Weld, R-Brooke, have been very helpful through the process. Fluharty said that in this case, the power of the government was blind to party affiliation and focused on fixing a serious community problem.
“We all came together- a good example of bipartisanship, some good government, some good community service all coming together to see what we can figure out and do this piece by piece,” Fluharty said.