Too poor to protect: When cost-benefit analysis leaves towns to “Wash Away”

By Penny Loeb

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“The town is flooding!” a worker at the Nicholas County Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Richwood, West Virginia, yelled to Nancy Mullins around 1 p.m. on June 23, 2016.

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Workers carried fragile elderly people, with feeding tubes, IVs, and bandaged limbs, out the narrow gap between the back door and retaining wall.  A son of a resident grabbed Mullins and saved her from drowning as a torrent knocked her down. After water rose too high for a bus, Mullins helped carry the last 12 residents on sheets through high water to the church. Patients, some with Alzheimer’s, slept on wooden pews, and unknown numbers later died at facilities far away. 

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When FEMA officials held an informational meeting shortly after the flood, Bonnie Bailey Kroll, who had volunteered to run a distribution center in a vacant Main Street store, asked, why her community didn’t get flood gates or floodwalls. “I was told we didn’t have enough revenue [for it] to be feasible,” she said.

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Federal flood control law continually evolves, but the most radical change, Galloway said in a phone interview, came when the Reagan administration essentially made national economic development the sole objective, eliminating consideration of environmental benefits, public safety and other social impacts.

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