7-year-old Reese Roush’s job was to keep everybody hydrated at her Clendenin home as they began to clean up from the flood.
CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Dwyatt Bostic was sitting in his living room trying to escape from the heat.
It was only 10:30 a.m. on Saturday but the temperature kept climbing higher and higher. He and another woman live just above the Exxon gas station that hugs the Elk River in Clendenin. Because his apartment was on the second floor of the building, his belongings were safe from the flood water rushing down below.
“We were just sitting on the couch talking,” Bostic said. “I heard the asphalt cracking and popping. I said, ‘That ain’t good.’ We grabbed our cellphones, went right down the steps and went over there and boom, it caved in.”
The asphalt parking lot next to his apartment had cracked and fallen into the river. Thirty minutes later, half of his apartment fell with it. The other half was barely hanging on to the little bit of hard ground left.
As the people of Clendenin continued to clean up after devastating floods that ravaged the county and killed at least 25 across the state, several businesses and homes that sat along the bank of the Elk fell into the river. Many more appeared to be on the verge…
