By Mike Tony, Charleston Gazette-Mail
CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Deaths: 35.
Property damage: $482.3 million.
Those are the losses that West Virginia suffered due to flood and flash flood events from 2004 through May 2024, according to a Gazette-Mail review of National Centers for Environmental Information data.
That’s the same time frame West Virginia officials operated under a 365-page flood protection plan, adopted in 2004, without updating it — and often ignoring it as a worsening climate crisis elevated West Virginia’s already high flood risk.
State Resiliency Office Director Robert Martin Jr. told a flood-focused panel of state lawmakers, the Joint Legislative Flooding Committee, at a September 2021 meeting the 2004 plan included “a lot of things [that] are really antiquated” since it “hadn’t been looked at in around 20 years.”
The State Resiliency Office observed that only 14% of recommendations from the state’s flood protection plan were implemented.
The plan offered a long list of flood control recommendations, such as:
- Updating floodplain maps
- Integrating geographic information systems with flood damage data
- Building-code updates
- Funding stream restoration
New flood plan available
But now there’s a new plan to guide officials at all government levels as they look to better protect West Virginia from flooding amid increasingly common rainstorm events brought on by climate change.
