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Anthony Myers got out of his car and looked around. He didn’t need to look long before he saw how he could help.
“I need a blower,” he told his cousin. “You’ve got glass up and down the road.”
A few minutes later, Myers was tugging on the cord of a leaf blower and setting off down the road to clear it of all the shards that were glistening in the sunlight.
This riverside neighborhood outside Pembroke in Giles County is one of those places you might never find unless you knew it was there. To get there, you have to drive past the town’s sewage treatment plant, generally not a welcome landmark, and then drive over the railroad tracks on a road so steep that when you finally get to the top, your car is pointed up so high you can’t see the road going down on the other side. You just hope you don’t get stuck with a train coming. When you finally do get down the other side, though, you find a hidden gem — a row of small houses squeezed onto the land between the rail and the river. (Update: Locals say the private road is Cliffview Drive and the neighborhood doesn’t have a name although county officials said it’s known as Caboose Lane, which is the name of a road a little further on).
“This is our little getaway from the real world,” Myers said, before he fired up the leaf blower. On a normal day, it’s a quiet place to watch the New River roll back. On the night Helene struck, it was a place to run away from, as the New River surged out of its banks and submerged one-story houses about three-quarters of the way up to the roof. A week after the storm, this riverside road was anything but quiet. Up and down the road, people were at work cleaning up, and not just people who lived there. Myers lives in Pearisburg, about seven miles away, but came to help his cousin — and everyone else who lives nearby.
This is a state road, but Myers wasn’t waiting for someone clear the road of glass hazards. He’d do it himself.
That was typical of the people I met Friday. As I sit writing this column, I’ve just received a pitch from a public relations agency offering an interview with an author eager to talk about how the federal government is unprepared to deal with natural disasters. Former President Donald Trump and other Republicans have been quick to criticize President Joe Biden for not being more visible during the storm, and then not doing enough to offer federal help to stricken states. All that may be true — or not — but I didn’t hear anything like that during my time in Giles County, easily one of the most Republican counties in the state.
It’s not that the people I talked to didn’t want government help. They just weren’t looking to Richmond or Washington for that help. Instead, they looked to their local government in the county seat of Pearisburg — and felt they were getting the help they needed.
At one house Kim Kipling heaped up trash from the storm — and heaped praise on the local government for sending out work crews to help residents. “They’ve been up and down this road with backhoes,” he said, clearing away brush and trash. Every few hours, a county trash truck rumbles down the road — I saw several during my time there — to pick up the latest load. “They’ve been here four or five times a day,” said Tim Myers, the cousin who the road leaf-blower Anthony Myers was coming to help. “The fire department comes by about every two hours to check on people.” Kipling concurred: “I can’t begin to say enough about our fire and rescue people.”
It’s not often these days you hear people praise government, but I heard it in Giles County. The key is, that praise was for the local government.
Giles County directed its staff to find new housing for displaced residents
In some ways, Giles County was one of the hardest-hit places in Virginia. The New River, which snakes for 37 miles through the county and runs through or near all its major towns, rose to levels not seen since 1940 and roared through multiple neighborhoods, this road being just one of them. County administrator Chris McKlarney said 48 people in the county were permanently displaced because their homes (which in some cases were campers by the river) were destroyed in the floodwaters.
Within a week of the storm, the county had already found new permanent housing for 22 of those people, and McKlarney said he expected to find permanent housing for 16 more in a few days. The rest, he said, had told the county they didn’t need assistance; they’d find a place to live on their own.
Giles County didn’t wait for the state or federal government. It acted on its own. Almost as soon as the storm was over, and the extent of the damage was becoming clear, McKlarney directed his staff to take charge of finding housing for the county’s displaced residents, matching them up with owners of local rental properties and making sure it was something the family could afford in the long term. The county is offering up to $2,000 to cover the first month’s rent and security deposits. If any money is left over from that, it can go toward utilities, McKlarney said.
All this happened before FEMA approved Giles for individual assistance as part of the federal disaster declaration. How can a rural county like Giles afford this? McKlarney put it this way: “That’s what we’re here for. If we can’t do that, what are we here for?”
McKlarney is an engineer by profession and brings an engineer’s practical eye to what some see as the ideological business of government. What works? In Giles’ case, this is what works.
While individual residents may not see the hand of the state and federal government at work, just the local one, McKlarney does. He ran through a long list of politicians to whom he wanted to give thanks for their help — Gov. Glenn Youngkin, Senators Tim Kaine and Mark Warner, Rep. Morgan Griffith, state legislators Jason Ballard and Travis Hackworth. Each in their own way had helped set things in motion to help Giles recover from the flood, he said. The federal officials helped push to get Giles approved for individual assistance through the Federal Emergency Management Administration; the state officials have helped in ways that often go beyond their official job description.
Much of Giles’ economy is built around tourism and that tourism often relates to the New River — the county’s website lists 13 places where you can get access to the New River for your boat, your kayak, or whatever floats. Each year, the county (whose slogan is “Virginia’s Mountain Playground”) has organized a regular clean-up day to make sure the river is free of whatever debris has washed downstream. The county just had its end-of-the-summer “Fall Into the New” clean-up on Sept. 14. On that day, 302 volunteers fanned out across the river. They filled up 223 bags of trash and hauled in 56 tires.
Two weeks later, Helene hit.
How in the world was Giles supposed to deal with all the trash the storm washed downstream? McKlarney consulted Del. Jason Ballard, R-Giles County. Ballard had an idea: How about enlisting the Virginia Tech Corps of Cadets? Within eight hours, 500 Tech cadets were committed to the clean-up. Another 250 volunteers signed up on their own. On Saturday, those 750 volunteers were back out on the river and the riverbanks, bagging up trash and dragging out who knows what, but instead of 250 other volunteers showing up, 300 did.
McKlarney said that the federal disaster aid will be important in the coming months, but for now, the most visible and practical help has come from private donations. Last week, a tractor-trailer arrived full of medicines — “over the counter stuff that people lost,” he said, and couldn’t afford to replace. The county’s school bus garage has been repurposed as a place to store some of the supplies; others have been apportioned to local fire and rescue departments to distribute — such as on those regular checks along this road and elsewhere.
On Friday, a tractor-trailer load of donated supplies rolled into Giles County from two churches in Ohio — the Spaulding Road Church of God in Dayton and the Pentecostal Faith Church in New Miami. McKlarney said state Sen. Travis Hackworth, R-Tazewell County, was responsible for those. (The Facebook page for the Spaulding Road Church of God lists particulars of the effort, with this notation: “Senator/Bro Travis Hackworth is our point of contact for distribution.”)
Hackworth deflects the attention. “We have a large network of churches all over the nation I have been affiliated with and ministered in since I was a teenager,” he told me. “Several of those have reached out and asked what they can do and I have navigated them to our hardest hit communities.” One church in Martinsburg, West Virginia, delivered a 24-foot trailer of pet supplies to the Radford animal shelter that had been flooded. The Ohio delivery is just one of many, he said. “We also have 19 pallets of water arriving on Monday from another group out of Montana.” Hackworth has basically been a one-man relief agency for his senatorial district, which covers all or part of seven counties and two cities, all of which suffered storm damage.
On Saturday, the Narrows Fire Department announced it was so overwhelmed with donations that it was going to “pause” donations for awhile.
McKlarney is amazed by the outpouring of volunteers and donations, which he said he couldn’t begin to estimate. “As terrible as the flood is, something beautiful has come out of it,” he said. “America at its best.”
‘Don’t let the state and federal government do anything stupid.’
Shawn Hash spent the evening of the storm watching the river in his backyard and the phone in his hand.
He kept checking what the water level gauges along the New River were saying. “I’m there monitoring it — it’s going to be 20 feet, 21 feet.”
But the numbers kept rising, and so did the river.
“Twenty-three feet is right here,” he said, pointing to the small stilts holding up the back deck on his riverfront property outside Pembroke in Giles County. “That would be bad,” he said, but bearable. He’d seen that once before, during the remnants of Hurricane Michael in 2018.
It wasn’t long before he knew this time the river would crest even higher — and that he and his family had better get out. “I put everything up on the bar tops,” he said. That didn’t do any good. “It got eight feet higher than anything I’d ever seen,” Hash said.
Eventually the river crested at 31 feet above flood stage — so high it came up about three-quarters of the way on his front door. “It was crazy,” he said, not just how high the water came, but also how fast it rose. Early in the evening, the river was still within its banks. By 2 a.m., the river was running through his house.
By the next evening, though, the water was down almost as fast as it rose — and Hash was back at the house, starting a very long cleanup.
A week after the storm, so were all of his neighbors. For as far as the eye could see, yards were full of things either drying out or destined for the trash heap. Furniture, appliances, toys, you name it.
On Friday, I followed Kaine, D-Virginia, as he walked up and down the road to check on residents, one of several visits he’s made to Southwest Virginia communities that were in Helene’s path. Whenever he saw something, Kaine would stop and ask what they needed. I didn’t hear anyone say they needed anything specific — right now, anyway.
Some of the county officials who accompanied Kaine saw things differently. Kaine wondered how hard it would be to find contractors to make repairs. “They’ll be jammed up,” he said. Ricky McCoy, chairman of the county Board of Supervisors, agreed — because it was hard to find contractors even before the storm. “It’s very difficult to find masons and carpenters,” he said. That fits into one of Kaine’s agendas in the Senate, to find ways to make the trades a more appealing career option for young people, but he resisted what I’m sure might have been the temptation to give a campaign speech.
Instead, Kaine talked about the package of storm relief that he expects Congress to approve. “It will be one of the least partisan things we’ve done,” he said. The tricky parts, he said, will be the details of what the money can go for. He noted there are often restrictions as to what some agencies can spend money on, but said he was mindful that the Forest Service needed to have money available for cleaning up storm damage on public lands — a subject much on the minds of officials in tourism-minded Giles County.
As Kaine spoke, the Appalachian Trail, which runs through Giles, remained closed. So were some of the most popular hiking trails in the county, including the one to the Cascades waterfall. That’s a particular concern for McKlarney, because the Cascades draws a lot of tourists and those tourists spend money in the county.
An outdoors enthusiast, Kaine ticked off a list of outdoor assets damaged elsewhere in Southwest Virginia, including 10 trestles washed away on the Creeper Trail in Grayson and Washington counties. He said he wants to make sure the federal relief package covers things like that. Despite the near-historic water levels, Giles somehow avoided major damage to roads and bridges. Other localities in Southwest Virginia weren’t so fortunate. In some places in Grayson and Washington (and perhaps elsewhere) whole roads are simply gone. People can take leaf blowers to clean up glass on the roads on their own but state and federal aid will be important later when it comes to rebuilding infrastructure.
As he walked down the road, Kaine was specifically looking for one resident — Hash. They’d met decades ago when Kaine was looking for a fishing guide on the New River. When Kaine, lieutenant governor at the time, called him back then, Hash thought his friends were pranking him. But no, it really was the lieutenant governor who wanted advice on the best fishing spots on the New River. Since then they’ve become friends and, when Kaine was governor, he appointed Hash to the Virginia Tourism Corporation board because he felt the board needed someone familiar with outdoor recreation. Kaine joked that Hash got mad at him “because he had to put on a tie and go to meetings.”
At Hash’s house, a man was carrying out what looked like insulation and piling it up for the next trash truck that came from. Kaine asked the man if Hash was home. In a few minutes, Hash appeared at the doorway. “Dude!” he shouted, and rushed out to greet Kaine and recount the storm.
When Kaine asked what the federal government could do to help, Hash told him: “Don’t let the state and federal government do anything stupid.”
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