WESTON, W.Va. — Residents and business owners are sharing some of their experiences as recovery and cleanup operations continue across Upshur and Lewis Counties.
In Weston, the owner of Appalachian Glass, Chip Turner said flood waters came to within one inch from entering his building. He weathered the storm in his glass blowing shop and watched as flood waters consumed the road and compromised his outbuildings.
“I am blessed! No matter how much damage we got, so many people got so much worse; I feel sorry for those people,” Turner said. “There are people that lost everything, and I actually feel bad—I’m glad that I didn’t, but I feel bad for those people; it’s just awful.”
On the day of the flood, Turner worked a 12-hour day before going to help a friend nearby. While at that home, the rain started and within 20 minutes or so he began to receive text warnings that his glass furnace has lost power and required attention. He navigated U.S. 19 until it was impassable due to high water then made his way over to I-79 to get back to Weston dodging heavy rain, sheets of water draining off the hillside, and at times mudslides encroaching into the roadway.
“From Stonewall Resort there’s a stone wall coming this way toward town,” Turner said. “That rock wall, honest to God, looked like Niagara Falls—there was a solid sheet of water running down and hitting into the road.”
When he returned to the shop the water building in the parking lot was not unlike any other storm. After checking some of the equipment he observed the storm from the back of the shop and discovered the Buckhannon River that is about a football field away from the back of the shop now looked like a pond that was within feet of his building. Going back to the front of the shop he noticed a male subject walking up the loading dock and immediately offered him shelter from the storm.
“He said he was in the Dollar Store when the water just came, and he was trying to get someone out when he told his girlfriend to run, and he had no idea where she went, and he was walking around chest deep in flood water looking for his girlfriend,” Turner said.
Turner said the man refused to stay inside through the night for fear he would not his girlfriend if she were to cry for help. The man remained on the loading dock until early the following morning.
Turner watched the intense rain, and the flood waters advance on his building until about 11:15 p.m. when the water appeared to stop rising. He marked the high-water point about one inch from entering the building about 30 feet away from the heart of the business — the glass furnace.
“It got so high I just kept saying it’s not coming in the building, it’s not coming in the building, and finally it started to settle down,” Turner said.
The hours that followed were a blur of assessing damage, cleaning up outbuildings and cleaning the parking lot. The parking lot was power washed and scrapped, an outbuilding had to be cleaned out and a generator was lost.
“I didn’t realize it, but when I got home, I had been here for 41 hours,” Turner said. “I had been awake for 41 hours without sleeping, and I guess it’s the adrenaline rush of trying to save everything; you don’t even think about it, but man, when I got home, I was tired.”