For renters locked out of state assistance, the road to flood recovery is long

Candy Burgess recounted the night of the February 2025 flood that destroyed her home. 

She stood in the kitchen of the house she’d rented on Riverside Drive in Grundy before the storm, and took stock of the damaged appliances. 

“You can’t get to the stove but there’s a meatloaf in the oven,” she said. 

The refrigerator hung open, caked with remnants of food, dirt and evidence that someone or something had rummaged through it. Maybe a bear, maybe a person, Burgess said. 

A framed picture that read “God bless our home” hung over the doorway between the living room and kitchen. In front of it was a hole in the ceiling where animals could be heard skittering in the floorboards between the first and second floors. 

The property sits on the shore of the Levisa Fork River. The river crested at 24.31 feet on Feb. 16, 2025, according to a water gauge located about 8 miles upstream from the Burgesses’ home. It was the second-highest water mark in the river’s history and fell just below the major flooding threshold of 25 feet, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The average water level at that gauge sits between 2 and 3 feet. 

“It didn’t take long for it to get high,” Burgess said. “It was really bad.”

She estimated that the water rose about 10 feet in the house that she rented with her husband, Delbert Burgess. Delbert had dementia and was in hospice care at the time. He was lying on a medical bed in the front of the house the night of the flood. 

The bed, water-damaged, remained in the front room of the house 16 months later. Dried mud crusted the now soft vinyl floor. Rent-to-own furniture that Candy Burgess was still paying off sat in the living room, rendered unusable by the flood. Recovering from the flood has been difficult, she said. 

There were few programs available that offered renters recovery assistance following the floods that devastated Southwest Virginia. 

Burgess sought help from the state through the Virginia Disaster Assistance Fund, the $50 million pot of money appropriated by the General Assembly in 2025 for flood recovery. She was told she is ineligible for the program because she did not own the house that flooded. 

The median monthly rent in Buchanan County is roughly $750, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Oftentimes, landlords require a security deposit that can total the price of one month’s rent as well as other fees to move into a rental property. The cost to move into a rental home can easily exceed $1,500. 

The February 2025 storm rendered her homeless, and now she was on the cusp of losing the trailer where she had lived since July 2025. The owner of the trailer had allowed her to live in the home free of charge but had recently begun an effort to evict Burgess to use the trailer for storage, Burgess said. 

“I just feel like going and digging a hole and jumping in,” Burgess said, her voice laden with emotion. “I don’t know what to do. I don’t have money to rent nowhere, I don’t.”

Renters excluded from state assistance program

The Virginia Disaster Assistance Fund covers repair or replacement of “real property” only. That restriction was written into the budget language that created the fund during the 2025 legislative session. 

“Unfortunately, we’re not able to cover any impacted renters and their personal property that might have been lost,” said Tamarah Holmes, director of the Virginia Department of Housing and Community Development, the agency that manages the fund. 

Real property is legally defined as land and structures built on that land, like a home, while “personal property” is any movable non-land asset, like a vehicle or a couch. Real property owners are also unable to receive assistance from the VDAF program to replace personal property that they may have lost in the flood. 

Del. William Morefield, R-Tazewell County, said he initially pushed to include personal property in the budget language for the program. 

“It became apparent early on, the significant additional cost and difficulty of how to accurately assess personal property value would not have the support we needed to get something passed,” he said. “The primary purpose of the relief programs was to focus on bridges, retaining walls, residential and commercial structures.”

The owner of a rental property affected by the flood could apply and qualify for recovery assistance through the state program. 

But that option was not available to the Burgesses. The owner of their rented home had died in late January 2025, just before the flood. The now uninhabitable property was in the process of being purchased from the estate of the deceased by the Army Corps of Engineers, Candy Burgess said. It will likely be torn down. 

A daring escape and housing uncertainty

“My son-in-law looked out back and the water was coming up and he said, ‘Candy, it’s flooding, we’ve got to get out of here,’” Burgess said. “We grabbed what we needed and he grabbed Delbert. Delbert said, ‘Well I ain’t going,’ and he just grabbed Delbert and carried him out.”

Water had submerged the wheels on Burgess’ Jeep that February evening, but they were able to get the vehicle out of the yard and onto the road. Their first plan of action was to drive to a relative’s house about 16 miles away in Mouthcard, Kentucky, but they were forced to turn around due to high water. 

Then they decided to head to Richlands, about 30 miles away in the opposite direction, to seek lodging in a motel for the night. High water forced them to abandon that plan, too. 

“We ended up having to stay in our vehicle at Shortridge-Ramey Funeral Home,” she said. “That’s where we stayed overnight.”

After the water receded enough to allow for road travel, Candy and Delbert Burgess went to stay with family for a few months in Mouthcard, a small unincorporated town just over the state line between Virginia and Kentucky. Delbert was in and out of the hospital during that time. They stayed in Kentucky until a friend offered to let them live in the trailer home in Grundy, where Candy Burgess currently resides, free of charge. 

In the summer of 2025, after the flood, she was told that Delbert was actively dying after a stint in the hospital, so she moved herself and her husband into the offered trailer on Little Prater Road. Delbert died six hours after they moved into the home. He was 91 years old. 

Burgess said she is unsure where she will live if she’s forced to leave the trailer. 

“I don’t know what to do, I have no idea,” she said. “I don’t draw that much. I’m disabled.”

Burgess, who’s 55, said she has lymphedema and lupus and was recently diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. She is diabetic and recently experienced heart failure. She lives on a fixed income. 

She received $800 from the Red Cross immediately after the storm to recover some medical equipment and other expenses. 

“We needed clothes because our clothes were flooded,” she said. “And then we needed food.”

But she hasn’t been able to find other assistance, she said. 

Some hope on the horizon

Marci Watson, director of the Buchanan County Department of Social Services, said that United Way of Southwest Virginia is the only organization she is aware of that can provide long-term recovery assistance to renters who were affected by the flood.

Dan Rice, the nonprofit’s disaster services manager, said there’s an unwritten rule in disaster recovery — the “rule of tens” — that’s used to estimate how long recovery could take in a community. The number of days that emergency personnel were on site at a disaster is multiplied by 10 to get an estimate of how long short-term recovery could take. Then that number is multiplied by another 10 to get an estimate on how many days it could take before a community sees long-term recovery. 

“You use it to gauge where you’re at,” he said. 

Bart Chambers, Buchanan County’s emergency management coordinator, said the county and the state worked together to make sure all residents were accounted for and set up food distribution centers in the immediate aftermath of the storm. He estimated that emergency personnel were on the ground in full force for about two weeks in the initial push to recover. 

Using Rice’s formula, that puts short-term recovery at about 4.6 months and long-term recovery at roughly 3.8 years. Candy Burgess has found herself in limbo, somewhere between those two estimates. 

United Way has helped five renters find new homes and has given them money for security deposits and first month’s rent in the aftermath of both Hurricane Helene and the February 2025 flood, Rice said. 

“When you don’t own the home, it’s kind of tricky to navigate, like what is the value [of property loss] you can assess for somebody who has been paying rent,” he said. 

Renters accounted for about 7% of the population in Buchanan County, according to 2024 census data. 

Candy Burgess is one of about 1,275 renters in a county with a population of 18,632, according to census data. It is unclear how many other renters were affected by the February flood. Neither the Buchanan County Department of Social Services nor the United Way of Southwest Virginia collected data on affected renters. 

The row of homes next to the one rented by the Burgesses on Riverside Drive were also abandoned following the storm. 

Down the road stood the shell of the Grundy Floral and Gift Shop, where Burgess worked part time before the flood. The paint on the shop’s sign was chipped and weather-bleached. The inside of the structure had been gutted. 

She had known the owner and worked in the shop since she was 14 years old. She loved to work with tulips — the colors and the shape of them appealed to her — and azaleas, too. She hated roses, though, and poinsettias. She saw too many of them, she said. 

The shop had flooded in 1977, when the Levisa Fork River rose to its highest recorded crest of 27.38 feet. The building was repaired and the business reopened after the 1977 flood. 

It has not bounced back following the 2025 flood. The business, a second home and sanctuary of sorts for Candy Burgess, has remained closed and the property has been sold.