BOMONT, W.Va. (AP) - Joe and Sherry Fasanelli’s Clay County home is coming along now, nearly six months after 3 feet of water invaded.
Earlier this month, they were still sleeping on cots in the living room, surrounded by their belongings in overflowing boxes and storage containers.
The couple has lived in their home at the foot of a mountain, just yards from the Elk River, for nearly 37 years. The June 23 flood that devastated West Virginia destroyed nearly everything they owned, but it did not drive them from their home.
The couple stayed throughout the reconstruction process, which has been aided by a steady stream of volunteer work crews.
“You find out what you’re made of,” said Joe Fasanelli, 74, a retired mechanic.
“You do,” Sherry Fasanelli, 68, echoed. “You find out that you can do things that you never thought you could do.”
The house’s interior has been gutted and undergone reconstruction over the past few months. They were there without water and electricity in the sweltering heat for weeks after the flood.
“You could walk in the house, and it was like 107 to 110 degrees all the time,” Sherry said. “We slept with every window open. And our generator wouldn’t work, it was messed up. So for a long time we was without any kind of electric.”
Sherry did ask her husband to consider leaving, she said. But the two are too old to leave, she said. Their desire to stay is only intensified by Joe’s illness: He’s battled brain cancer for four years.
“He looked at me, and for the first time in years, I saw tears in that man’s eyes,” Sherry Fasanelli said. “And he said, ’Will you help me fix this? Will you promise to help me?’ He said ’I want to die here.’ And right then and there, that was it.”
On most Sundays since the flood, the Clay Lions Club has led volunteer work crews at various houses throughout the county, member Ashley Truman said.
They worked for several weeks at the Fasanellis’. Truman said the couple has become like family to her.
“That’s my Aunt Sherry,” Truman said.
Recently Amish and Mennonite groups also have volunteered at the home. Earlier this month, volunteers still had new flooring to put down, walls to paint and wall trim to install.
Sherry Fasanelli said the couple could not have done the work without them.
“These people don’t have to do what they’re doing, and I don’t think they get near the praise they should - none of them,” she said.
Like the progress made on the Fasanellis’ home, Clay County and state officials say they’re also making progress on the housing needs of all the county’s flood survivors.
Rhonda McDonald, chairwoman of the Greater Clay Long-Term Recovery Committee, said, while there’s plenty more work to do, people are at least no longer living in tents.
“We have scoured this county looking for tents,” McDonald said. “With the couple of cold snaps that we’ve had, I think if someone were in a tent they would have definitely reached out by now.”
Earlier this month, McDonald said the committee knew of seven families who are still staying in campers. If other people are in campers, they haven’t reached out to the committee for help, she said.
McDonald said the committee can’t help get all of the families into permanent homes before winter, but they’re shifting their focus to weatherizing the campers and providing heat sources so people will be out of the cold.
“Our concern is we know they’re going to have increased utility costs with the electric heat,” she said. “We’re working with an organization to help with funding to pay those excessive heat bills, which we know they’re going to have.”
McDonald said she’s pleased with the work that’s been done so far.
“I can sleep at night now,” McDonald said. “I think everyone is in a warm and safe place in Clay County.”
Campers are not the best circumstance to be in, she said, but “at least we know they’re going to be safe and warm.”
Three other families were without homes or campers. One of them had been staying in a section of a feed store, while others stay with relatives, she said.
“We’re going to be working on those three next, pretty hard and heavy in the next week,” McDonald said.
Neighbors Loving Neighbors, a campaign started by The Greenbrier resort, is providing two Clay County families with mobile homes, said campaign president Habibi Mamone. One home will go to a family of six and another will go to Nick Street, 28, and his young son Matthew Brayden.
Street and his mother, Pam Street, had been renting a home together ever since both of their homes were destroyed in the flood.
Their landlord sold the house last month and they’d been looking for new homes ever since.
Nick Street said it was difficult at first, but he found land in Clay County on which to put his new home.
As of earlier this month, McDonald said the committee had 165 cases since the flood. A little more than 100 were still open, she said. Funding and labor remain the committee’s biggest needs, McDonald said.
“We got a lot of new cases this month,” McDonald said. “It’s getting colder and people are beginning to realize they’re not going to be able to get it done themselves. The ones who waited to get it done themselves are reaching out for help because they know they need it.”
Maj. Gen. James Hoyer, the adjutant general of the West Virginia National Guard, said the next job he’s working on in Clay is to finish paperwork to have 35 damaged homes demolished. The National Guard is managing the demolition and will bid out the work to private sector companies, he said.
In early November, officials in Clay County were divided in their recovery efforts. The Clay County Commission had formed its own committee to coordinate recovery efforts, choosing not to work with the Greater Clay Long-Term Committee. Greater Clay members had complained of bullying from West Virginia Voluntary Organizations Active in Disasters, something executive director Jenny Gannaway and Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin’s office has denied.
“At one point, for a variety of reasons, we weren’t all working on the same path,” Hoyer said of the division. “Some of that was because Clay County was in bad situation before the flood and then exasperated by the flood.”
Now, the county’s committee has been dissolved back into the Greater Clay Long-Term Committee. VOAD is working with the committee and will help to fund several of the unmet needs cases in the county, McDonald said.
Hoyer said he’s pleased with the progress Clay County is making.
“I think we’ve made substantial progress,” Hoyer said.
McDonald has been on the job as committee chairwoman since Nov. 6. A business consultant for 20 years, McDonald originally offered leadership training to the committee before becoming chairwoman.
“I think a lot of the reasons why we had a lot of contention and division was just lack of understanding,” she said. “I just don’t think people understood everybody’s role.”
___
Information from: The Charleston Gazette-Mail, https://wvgazettemail.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.