Speaker Scott tours flood damage in Pulaski County: ‘Wow’

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Dave Williams had never seen Don Scott before in his life.

He hugged him anyway.

“Thank you for coming,” he said, over and over.

Williams lost his home in Pulaski County to Hurricane Helene. “I’m living now in a motel in Dublin,” he said.

Scott, though, has a house — specifically the House of Delegates, over which the Portsmouth Democrat presides as speaker.

This week, Scott was in Wytheville for the annual Rural Summit, sponsored by the Senator Frank Ruff Center for Rural Virginia. On Tuesday afternoon, state Sen. Travis Hackworth, R-Tazewell County, pried Scott away from the event for an afternoon tour of Hiwassee and Allisonia, two communities along the New River in Pulaski County that were damaged by the storm. That tour started with a meeting with fire and rescue personnel, a ride in “Big Red” — a surplus military vehicle that the department used for water rescues — and culminated with the Speaker of the House touring Williams’ riverfront property.

The visit was poignant. “My flag got muddy, I’m sorry,” Williams said, as he pointed to Old Glory on a flagpole. “It’s going to dry out.”

The visit was light-hearted, when Williams told Scott that his chicken was named Donald Trump and Scott, a Democrat, joked that he might be better off without the bird.

Mostly, though, this visit was about a Southwest Virginia politician making the case that the entire state should support funding for helping with the recovery from Helene. We’ve written before about the unlikely friendship between Scott, a Democrat from urban Portsmouth near the sea, and Hackworth, a Republican from the mountains of Southwest Virginia. Before Helene, that was a curiosity that shows how the politics practiced in Richmond often aren’t nearly as divided we sometimes think. After Helene, that friendship has taken on more importance.

Hackworth wants to see the General Assembly create a standing fund for disaster relief, be it Helene or whatever the next storm might be, rather than try to fund relief on a case-by-case basis as it has been. “This is going to happen again, whether in Virginia Beach or here,” Hackworth said. He’d like to see the General Assembly put some money into this fund every year, just as it does other programs, but also set it up so that the fund can accept private donations. “Right now, we’re telling people to donate to the United Way but they’re almost overwhelmed,” he said.

To make that happen, he’ll need support from the Democratic majority in both houses, Democrats who represent an entirely different part of the state, one that wasn’t touched by the storm. Those Democrats, though, might pay attention to what the speaker has to say, so Hackworth wanted Scott to see firsthand how the storm may take years to recover from.

Scott has what might be a grander vision for Southwest Virginia than simply flood relief. “I think this is an opportunity to come up with something,” he said. The state has its eyes on Southwest Virginia right now, and the region should seize that to ask for whatever it needs, and not just for flood relief. As for what that might be, he says that’s not his to say. “I don’t want to dictate for a region,” he said. Instead, he ticked off a list of Southwest Virginia legislators: “I want to see what people like Travis Hackworth, Terry Kilgore, Israel O’Quinn, Todd Pillion can propose.”

* * *

For now, the details of any legislative package for flood relief simply don’t exist — but the damage from Helene sure does, and Scott got to see it up close.

Scott’s tour began at the Hiwassee Volunteer Fire Department building, where he met with a dozen or so firefighters and got a briefing from county administrator Jonathan Sweet. In Pulaski County, the problem wasn’t rain, Sweet said, it was rain in North Carolina that swelled the New River and sent it gushing northward (the New River is the rare river that flows south to north). Along this particular stretch, the river rose at a rate of two feet an hour and crested higher than it ever had. In Allisonia, the Allisonia Pentecostal Holiness Church, which had never flooded since it was built in 1912, was partially submerged. The normal flow of water in the New River as it approaches the hydroelectric dam on Claytor Lake is 3,000 cubic feet per second. During Helene, it was 167,000 feet per second. Pulaski firefighters told stories of hearing unearthly metal screams as trailers parked in campsites along the river were swept away and crashed into whatever was in their way.

Pulaski public safety workers, along with a crew from Fairfax County that had been dispatched to the region in advance of the storm, conducted 10 swift-water rescues.

Two of those were for Williams and his wife, Jodi.

Williams recalls a firefighter showing up as the water started lapping against his home and covering the nearby road. “He said, Dave, we’ve got to go. I don’t want to do this at nighttime.”

The first trip took Williams, two cats and a duck. “They got the dog and Jodi on the second trip,” he recalls.

The chicken named Trump floated away on a dock that came loose and was presumed lost forever. After the storm, he got a phone call from a neighbor: “I understand you’re missing a chicken. It’s down at the house.”

Someone found his missing canoe and returned that, too.

“People ask, what are you missing? I tell ’em and they say it’s down here at the house.”

Others weren’t so lucky. Sweet said 12 homes in the county, at least 65 homes in the county were “majorly damaged” and 39 “minorly damaged.” The county is still totaling up the cost of the storm, but it’s approaching $7 million and growing. Claytor Lake filled up with 240 tons of debris, much of it from North Carolina. One of the 100 propane tanks fished out of the lake bore a label from West Jefferson, a North Carolina town 80 miles upstream from Hiwassee. When Gov. Glenn Youngkin visited shortly Claytor Lake after the storm, he went out on a boat — but the boat couldn’t get through some of the debris. Authorities were afraid those floating propane tanks would explode. “We burned them off — it was a non-stop eternal flame burning for weeks,” Sweet said.

“Wow,” Scott said, repeating himself. “Wow.”

“We’re still getting a lot of debris from downstream,” Sweet said. The high waters may have receded, but the flood remains a daily fact of life for those along the New River.

Hackworth told Scott of people who are now finding their insurance companies are rejecting their claims for flood damage. “It’s denied, denied, denied,” he said.

“Terrible,” Scott said.

Much of neighboring Montgomery County was under a boil notice because water systems were damaged. Hackworth also told of some malicious pranksters who called up restaurants and told them they were from the health department and it was fine to use the water again.

Disasters can bring out the worst in some people — and the best in others.

“I tell you, the community has come together,” Williams told Scott. “The fire department — I can’t ask for nothing better. They brought us food, blankets, everything. It’s really been a coming together.”

He’s now back at his property, fixing things up, so he can rent out space to campers next spring as he always does. “This is our dirt,” he said. “We’re coming back.”

“This is our dirt,” Scott repeated. “That’s the best line I’ve heard in a long time.”

* * *

Scott, who studied agriculture in college, walked down to the river behind Williams’ house, or what remains of it. He tested the ground with his sneakers and said he could feel how the flood had changed the soil. Sweet said the storm had also moved the channel in the river, which means the flood plain has likely changed, too — with implications for insurance — but no one is quite sure how much yet.

Some contours, though, are starting to become visible — the contours of the politics that lie ahead. Scott pointed out that the state ended the fiscal year with a $1.2 billion surplus. As big as the storm-related problems in Southwest Virginia are, Scott said, “this is a rounding error to fix the problem here” but “the governor wants to give it away” in the form of tax cuts or tax rebates. Politics are still politics. That’s the storm to come.

For now, this is about Hackworth educating fellow legislators, and one of the most important of those legislators absorbing the scale of the devastation.

“I’m so glad I came,” Scott said. “When you look at pictures, it’s just not the same. The pictures do not do it justice.”