WESTON, W.Va. — Around the city of Weston there are very distinct areas of flood damage or others with no problems at all. Higher points of town were spared any damage from Tuesday night’s water. Lower parts of the town were destroyed.
Dan Farnswoth lives in Weston and has been out in his community seeing the damage first hand.
“Vehicles that were destroyed. Houses had water right up to the bottom of their roof,” said Farnsworth.
He lived on higher ground and didn’t have any damage to his home. He did have large trees uprooting in his back yard and others he observed washing up in the river.
“In the river just down from my house there were all kinds of trees. These are huge trees, two people couldn’t get their arms around the whole trunk. These are very large,” he explained.
Although his home was spared, he was trapped and couldn’t get out of town at the height of the storm.
“The river was up so high there was no way to get out. We have a stop sign at the bottom of the hill on our road and you could just barely see the red at the top of the stop sign,” he explained.
Lewis County Commissioner Agnes Queen said people in Lewis County will be without some essential services for a period of time.
“We have two grocery stores, Wal-Mart and Shop-and-Save. One got flooded, that was Wal-Mart and the other is out of power,” she explained.
Many of the town’s businesses were lost in Tuesday night’s flood and Queen admitted it would take time.
“Gas stations were flooded, fast food restaurants were flooded. We don’t know how long it’s going to take us to get back on our feet. It’s going to take a lot of time, but we’ll get there,” she explained.
Queen said first responders and county emergency leaders were ready for a weather event, just not this one.
“We were prepared for a Derecho, not a devastating flood. We’ve had a lot of damages to residence, businesses, and tons of cars that have floated around. We’ve got a mess to clean up,” she said.