By Ashley B. Craig
Charleston Daily Mail
CHARLESTON, W.Va. — More than 40 people have been ferried across the Guyandotte River in Logan County after a mountain slide blocked the only access road to their small community outside of Neibert.
But state officials are working on ways to get them back home in coming weeks.
Madison Creek Road, the sole access road to a group of about 40 homes, remained blocked Wednesday after the mountainside above started to slide on Friday. No one has been able to enter or leave the community since.
The slip started Friday morning and continued Friday evening.
Vecellio and Grogan, the construction outfit working on the W.Va. 10 expansion project, worked to clear some of the debris over the weekend but by Sunday the earth had started to slide again.
By Monday it was worse, said Brent Walker, state Department of Transportation spokesman.
“It’s a pretty significant slide,” he said Wednesday afternoon. “Of course there’s a construction site up there, but the three days of rain really exacerbated the situation. So it turned into soup and became impassible.”
The three days of rain, which dropped nearly 2.86 inches of rain on the Charleston area from Thursday to Saturday, brought on 20 slides around the state, he said. The ground softened under the rain, leading engineers and work crews into a “losing battle,” he said.
Transportation officials began working with the Logan Emergency Ambulance Service Authority (LEASA) to get to residents trapped in the neighborhood to make sure they knew they had the option to leave.
Walker said county emergency crews ferried four residents out of the neighborhood across the Guyandotte River Tuesday evening. Forty more were ferried out Wednesday after a community meeting.
Some residents opted to stay in their homes, Walker said, citing that some residents had “real concerns” about leaving their homes…