PINEVILLE, W.Va. — The National Weather Service in Charleston said the next 12 to 24 hours in southern West Virginia carries the potential for “training storms.” The weather pattern involves a storm passing an area, dying out, then reforming in the same location. Sometimes the “train” can happen several times consecutively and put down a lot of water in a brief period of time. Nobody knows the potential danger such storms carry better than Dean Meadows, the Emergency Services Director in Wyoming County.
“That’s always something that puts us on alert,” said Meadows form his Pineville office Monday. “This isn’t something that sneaks us on us because we know what can happen during these storms. We have people prepare and let them know it’s coming.”
The best preparation is constant preparation. Meadows said they have done a lot of that in Wyoming County. Historically the county has endured a lot of flood damage over the years. Each of those events has helped to identify trouble spots and where there have been problems, they’ve tried to get people out of harm’s way. He said it has made a difference.
“We’ve been able to buyout over 130 flooded properties in the past few years,” he said. “All of that has become open space and that’s helped people who still live in those areas since there’s less volume in those areas and the water has a place to go.”
Still some live along low lying banks of streams and creeks and are threatened with every storm. Others depend on a bridge or stream crossing to get from their home to the highway. They are frequently cut off for days when the bridge or culvert washes out. The flood watch for the region stretches into the night time and those dark hours are the real danger according to Meadows.
“We’re having as much issue with landslides as with rising water,” said Meadows. “Someone will come around a curve in the night and not see that and that makes mudslides as big an issue for us as the rising water.”
Wyoming County had a heavy storm on Sunday which included high winds and large sized hail. The damage in the county to property was minimal according to Meadows, but the storm loosened a lot of trees and uprooted many more which caused mudslides. He said it also created the potential for many more with the ground saturated.