By Esteban Fernandez
For Times West Virginian
Fairmont — Of all the things that hurt about the belongings Nichole Senator lost last year in the flood, a teddy bear might hurt the most.
“My son, his father had passed,” she said. “And he had a teddy bear with his father’s ashes. And we lost that.”
Senator was one of the residents who lost her home and belongings when roughly 2,400 gallons of water over a thousand square foot area fell from the sky. She lived at the Fairmont Village Apartments, which experienced a wall collapse during the storm and water rush out of the windows. Among the things Senator lost were family photos, a beloved guitar and other treasured family belongings. They had only lived at the Fairmont Village Apartments for three months when the flood occurred.
Now, a year later, it’s still hard for Senator to talk about the trauma, but her family is doing better. Her employer, Mikey C’s, helped her find a new place to live a week and half after she became homeless.
While there were precious few upsides to the crisis, one was that the downpour took place during the day, Fairmont City Manager Travis Blosser said.
“If that would have been the reverse, had it have been at night, every after action discussion I’ve had with our folks, I don’t think there’s any way there would not have been fatalities in this community related to that catastrophic incident,” Blosser said. “We would have, without a doubt, probably had fatalities.”
While some pet fatalities happened, Blosser said, and those were unfortunate, he said, there were no human fatalities from last year’s flood. However, the incident has left a lasting impact on Blosser.
Since that time, his administration has put a strong focus on stormwater mitigation projects. Locust Avenue, which experienced heavy flooding, belongs to the Coal Run Hollow Watershed area. Another area that’s receiving attention is the Hickman Run Watershed area. East Park Avenue and Dairy Creme Corner belong to that watershed. Blosser’s administration is aggressively pursuing state and federal funding to improve stormwater runoff in those areas.
The city qualified for federal disaster money under the Federal Emergency Management Agency after the flood, not just for reimbursement, but for mitigation work to lessen the impact of future storms.
“It’s unfortunate that sometimes mitigation money isn’t available to deal with those issues prior to when you have a disaster,” Blosser said. “But those funds are available. So we’re working and have been working behind the scenes since that incident to get designs moving, get applications moving for that funding.”
That’s not the only impact the flood had on Blosser. Whenever the skies darken and a downpour starts to stir memories from a year ago, Blosser gets nervous. As a result, he now changes his schedule based on weather reports, so he can be in town if a storm event escalates to something unimaginable again. Meetings can always be rescheduled.
The Tygart Valley United Way was a major player in the city’s 2025 recovery as they coordinated the relief effort. One year later, Community Impact Director Casey Gilbert said the flood was one of the things the United Way had in mind when it recently formed its Community Resiliency Center in partnership with United Way Worldwide and Verizon.
“We are working with the United Way of Central West Virginia to provide statewide coverage through these two resiliency centers, which will focus on connecting with response agencies and other nonprofits and developing workshops, supply kits for households and just trying to help provide information and resources for being prepared for these disasters,” she said.
Gilbert said that while community resiliency has always been one of the four pillars of the United Way model, the flood made it clear how important it was to have a crisis network of nonprofits available to call on for help during times of emergency for people.
Fairmont State University couldn’t provide a response by press time, but they were also integral to the city’s recovery effort. First, they housed people left homeless by the destruction of the Fairmont Village Apartments. Then, they provided space for the American Red Cross to begin assisting people with flood recovery. More recently, the school worked with the city to take over the Fairmont Village Apartments, with an eye toward demolishing the blighted property and reusing the land for something community based.
Throughout the past year, Blosser has repeatedly warned through interviews and city manager reports that storms the scale of the one that hit Fairmont a year ago are becoming more common. However, much of the media discussion did not touch on why the frequency of those hundred year storms was increasing.
Climate change.
“You can’t be a leader if you’re unwilling to put people together and say, we’ve got to have the tough conversations and debate the issue,” Blosser said. “And sometimes some people are wrong. And sometimes, people are right and sometimes they’re in between. But leaders have to recognize and be willing to say, let’s have the tough conversation, because something’s leading to us having more of these severe weather events than what we historically have had.”
The role humans play in driving climate change is fair game, too, Blosser said. He laid out the role the city’s sewage treatment plant played in cleaning up the river as an example of how humans impacted the environment and then became responsible for it.
“I think that has to be a part of the conversations, that us, as humans, are part of the environment,” he said. “And what happens to it, and how we steward it.”
Read more from Times West Virginian, here.
