By CARTER WALKER
Times West Virginian
MANNINGTON, W.Va. — Tim Armstead, R-Kanawha, speaker of the West Virginia House of Delegates, assured Mannington Mayor Jim Taylor on Thursday that he would help the city and surrounding area recover from recent flooding.
(Photo by Carter Walker)
Armstead sympathized with the mayor and the city’s plight, citing the 2016 flooding in Kanawha County and other parts of southern West Virginia.
“It’s awfully hard to see your family go through something like that; I know,” Armstead said. “We want to help any way we can, especially since we’ve gone through it this past year. We know a little bit about what you’re facing.”
During their 40-minute meeting at city hall, where they were accompanied by Marion County Democratic Delegates Mike Caputo and Linda Longstreth and Republican Delegate Guy Ward, Taylor filled Armstead in on how the area had been affected.
Taylor said that he will have the total number of affected homes at the next city council meeting, but he believes that it is 20 homes destroyed and 300-400 with varying levels of damage.
He commended the National Guard and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for their response, as well as the residents for pulling together as a community.
“Being the mayor of the town it makes me awfully proud,” Taylor said of the neighborly response.
Armstead said that in his conversations with Gen. James Hoyer of the National Guard, they will be assessing the damages and costs to the area and submitting the findings to FEMA for what will likely be 75 percent reimbursements.
He hopes that the legislative body can go into a special session later this year to approve the allocation of funds from the state’s “rainy day” fund, to make up for the rest.
Armstead cautioned that this may take some time.
The speaker also suggested to Taylor that the community form a long-term recovery plan, as was done after last year’s flooding in the southern portion of the state.
Caputo said to Armstead that Taylor’s leadership had been “phenomenal” throughout the tragedy.
The mayor had to go to hospital after the first of the flooding hit on Friday, July 28, to have his gallbladder removed. He managed the early hours of the effort via text from his hospital bed.
Much of the conversation centered around how tragedies like this, though terrible, bring communities together.
An important aspect of the city’s recovery was the Mannington District Fair, Taylor said. He said that there was some debate over whether to cancel the fair, but in the end they decided to move forward.
While Taylor admitted that there was some backlash for this decision, he felt it was the right one to make.
Armstead agreed that the city needed a positive relief from the disaster, pointing to the community block party in his area two months after the 2016 flooding.
“We saw that there are a lot of people whose lives have been turned upside down,” Armstead said after the meeting. “We want to help them get their lives back to normal, and to even come out from the other side of this tragedy even stronger as communities.”
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