GREENBRIER COUNTY, W.Va. — By the end of the year, West Virginia United Methodist Disaster Recovery, a team that has been part of recovery efforts in central and southeastern West Virginia since the weeks after the June 2016 Flood, will wrap up its home rebuilding work.
“Our commitment is as long as it takes,” said Rev. John “Jack” Lipphardt, director of West Virginia United Methodist Disaster Recovery in the West Virginia Conference of the United Methodist Church.
“Our original work with UMCOR (United Methodist Committee on Relief) was supposed to end about a year and half ago, but we’ve had a couple of extensions recognizing the need still exists and the commitment of the United Methodist Church to see this through.”
On Friday, the latest home to be completed with volunteers from Mennonite Disaster Service coordinated through UMCOR was dedicated in Rainelle.
The three-bedroom home was built on the site of a former home to a family of five that was destroyed in the June 23, 2016 flooding.
The cost of the home was nearly $88,000 with principal funding coming from UMCOR, according to the organization.
“It’s elevated to mitigate against future flooding,” Lipphardt said of the new home the family was in the process of moving into as of Friday.
Since the 2016 storms, “They have lived with different family members trying to work out their recovery,” he said.
The family had originally applied for assistance with home rebuilding from RISE West Virginia which draws grant funding from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development via the state Department of Commerce.
Problems with administration repeatedly delayed RISE allocations leaving many flood victims in limbo for months or even years.
Once RISE ramped back up in coordination with the West Virginia National Guard and West Virginia Voluntary Organizations Active In Disaster, Lipphardt said the Rainelle family was determined ineligible for funding because the family income was “barely,” in Lipphart’s word, over HUD limits.
That decision came last fall which was when the family was then referred to West Virginia United Methodist Disaster Recovery.
After reviewing the case, building work started earlier this year.
Then came the pandemic.
“We had Mennonite teams who were going to provide most of the volunteer work and that largely got shut down with the coronavirus. We had the foundation built in March. We expected in April to get the framing completed but that got delayed to August,” Lipphardt said.
Smaller volunteer teams with those from Mennonite Disaster Services and elsewhere have been working to finish the home since then while following COVID-19 protocols.
After the home on Rainelle’s 9th Street, Lipphardt said the organization’s five remaining home projects were nearing completion in places that included Elkview, Clay and near Clendenin.
Since the immediate flood aftermath, Lipphardt said the disaster recovery ministry with 135 work teams and thousands of volunteers had built 28 new homes, rebuilt 104 homes and made significant repairs to 120 other homes in 12 counties.
Many of the projects have involved WV VOAD and other church organizations.
At the start, “FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) and UMCOR both told us that we were looking at three to four, possibly, five years of recovery which was amazing to us. We didn’t expect it would be that long,” said Rev. Lipphardt.
“It has just taken a long time.”