By State › West Virginia

West Virginia: Overview

Download all of West Virginia as PDF Print

Everything in the main manual and the skill guides applies in West Virginia exactly as written. What’s different here is the specific hazard profile and the state, local, and legal context around it. This page is the starting point; the other three pages under West Virginia go deeper on laws, local resources, and the data behind the risks named here.

The June 2016 flood: a thousand-year rainfall in under 12 hours

On June 23, 2016, torrential rain dropped 8 to 10 inches across Greenbrier County in less than half a day, a rainfall total meteorologists later classified as a once-in-1,000-year event. The town of White Sulphur Springs took the worst of it, where Howard’s Creek turned into a torrent that swept homes off their foundations. The flood killed 23 people statewide, most in Greenbrier County, and destroyed more than 1,500 homes and businesses. See the Risks page for the full data.

The 2014 Elk River chemical spill: a contamination disaster, not a storm

On January 9, 2014, up to 10,000 gallons of an industrial coal-cleaning chemical leaked from a storage tank into the Elk River in Charleston, just 1.5 miles upstream of the drinking-water intake serving 300,000 people. The contamination overwhelmed the water treatment plant’s ability to filter it out, and residents across the region were told not to use their tap water for any purpose, drinking, cooking, or bathing, for five days. This is a genuinely different kind of disaster from a flood or storm: no property was physically destroyed, but an entire metro area’s water supply became unusable with almost no warning. See the Risks page for the full data.

What this means for how you use the rest of this manual

The manual’s Tier structure and the skill guides apply without modification. What’s different in West Virginia: this manual’s stored-water guidance isn’t just for after a storm knocks out utilities, the Elk River spill shows that a water supply can become unsafe to use even while the taps keep running, and flash-flood risk in narrow Appalachian valleys like Greenbrier County’s can produce rainfall totals well beyond what most households plan around.

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