Jun. 17—FAIRMONT — It didn’t take long for Michael Meade to run an inventory of the contents of his apartment Monday.
“OK, that’s my bed and that’s my couch, ” he said. “The other stuff, I can’t tell.”
He was pointing to a pile of rubble from the now-ruined Fairmont Village Apartments building on Locust Avenue—which was a structural casualty of Sunday’s deluge that dropped up to 3 inches of rain in a short period of time across the city and other communities in Marion County.
Rain accumulating on the flat roof of the building began coursing through the floors below.
The pressure from all that precipitation caused a back wall to blow out, said Chris McIntire, who directs Homeland Security and 911 services for Marion.
In addition to Fairmont Village Apartments, dispatchers fielded 165 calls from the city and the county at the height of the storm, McIntire said, for water rescues, downed trees and swamped basements and roads.
What was bad, McIntire said, could have been tragically worse.
No injuries were reported in the building collapse.
“If it happened later in the evening, we probably would have had fatalities—or at least injuries, ” he said.
McIntire and other first responders gathered at the Marion County emergency dispatch center for an update from Gov. Patrick Morrisey, who declared a state of emergency in the county the evening before after the partial collapse of the apartment complex.
He did the same thing Saturday in Ohio County, where what could have been worse definitely was.
To date, six people have been reported dead in the panhandle county, with two others still missing, the governor said.
The governor praised police, fire, National Guard and other professionals, along with the neighbors who were for one another during the tumult in both counties.
“When bad things happen, we look out for one another, ” Morrisey said. “That’s what we do. We’re Mountaineers.”
For now, he said, he’s working with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as part of the disaster declaration for the two counties.
Part of that is getting on the record with damages to your home and other property, he said. Visit emd.wv.gov /disastersurvey through West Virginia Emergency Management to enter your information.
Meade was in the middle of an information overload Sunday, he said.
He wasn’t home when the rains came, but he started getting frantic calls from friends, who did video messages so he could see what was happening in real-time.
“Water was gushing and that was it, ” said Meade, who lived on the ground floor and had just moved in last month. “Everything happened so fast.”