Fairmont State hosts housing fair for those displaced by Sunday's flooding
FAIRMONT – Bella, a demure border collie mix, is a proper lady.
The polite pup always lets people know when she needs to go outside. That's why Teresa Snyder was surprised when she saw the water on the floor.
'Bella, that's not like you, girl,' Snyder remembered saying.
Then she saw the actual source — water was coming in under her door.
When she looked in the hallway, she saw it pouring down the walls, which she was trying to process, just as her ceiling began giving way at the same time.
'We had to get out of there,' said Snyder, who lived on the ground floor of Fairmont Village Apartments. 'The whole place was coming down all around us.'
Water on the flat roof of the apartment was pooling so fast – it rained about three inches in 30 minutes – that the resulting pressure from the build-up caused a back wall to blow out.
The sloped parking lot wasn't much better. Call it a fish bowl laced with white-water rapids, said Snyder's friend, Van Clark.
'I know it was at five feet,' Clark said.
'Yeah, and I don't swim,' Snyder added with a shiver.
Clark made sure an agitated Bella was secure on her leash as he hoisted Snyder to a window.
She suffered bruises and cuts to her feet that required a tetanus shot for good measure.
'Well, we were lucky and we know it was worse for a lot of other people,' she said. 'I feel bad for them. It's a tragedy.'
Snyder was referring to Ohio County in the Northern Panhandle, which was hit harder than Fairmont and Marion County. The storm that raged Saturday night to the north unspooled in north-central West Virginia the next day.
To date, eight people have died in the Ohio County floods.
Gov. Patrick Morrisey declared a state of emergency for both counties earlier this week, saying disaster relief from the Federal Emergency Management Agency is on its way.
Hopefully, the governor said.
Which was why, in part, that Snyder, Clark and Bella, too, were waiting at the Fairmont State University Falcon Center student union on Thursday afternoon.
The university was hosting a housing fair for displaced Fairmont Village residents.
Representatives of the state Housing Development Fund and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development were there, along with the West Virginia Coalition to End Homelessness.
Tygart Valley United Way had a table and a computer terminal, as did the American Red Cross and the Marion County Emergency Operations Center.
The idea, said Brian Selmeski, Fairmont State's chief of staff, is to get people back under a permanent roof, while launching the paperwork so that can eventually happen.
A Fairmont State social worker was also there to help those residents who were roiled emotionally by the deluge.
In the hours after Sunday's storm, the university opened part of the Falcon Center for emergency lodging.
That shelter will remain open for as long as needed, Selmeski said.
'We're here for our community,' the chief of staff said. 'This is what we're supposed to be doing.'
As people were still queuing up, more heavy rain could be witnessed on the other side of the large glass windows of the complex Thursday.
Rain lashed and trees were bent by the brief storm that blew through campus.
'Yeah, I hope that doesn't get too interesting,' one man said.
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