Rain falls on a farm in Jackson County last week. Despite rain from Hurricane Helene, the state’s drought continues. (Lori Kersey | West Virginia Watch)
Rainfall from Hurricane Helene last week lessened the dry conditions in parts of West Virginia, but the state’s historic drought continues.
The hurricane tore across the southern United States, causing flooding that destroyed homes and infrastructure and killed more than 200 people. More than half of those killed were in North Carolina.
While the Mountain State largely escaped the destruction, the storm brought West Virginia’s southern coalfields between 3.5 and 4.5 inches of rain, according to the National Weather Service. Mercer County, the one county where Gov. Jim Justice declared a state of emergency because of the storm, had between 3 and 7 inches of rain, said Robert Stonefield, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Blacksburg, Virginia.
In Charleston and along the Interstate 64 corridor and into Parkersburg and Flatwoods had between 1 and 2 inches of rain, said Megan Kiebler, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Charleston.
But despite the rain, with the exception of a portion of McDowell County, the entire state still has abnormally dry conditions to exceptional drought conditions, according to the latest assessment from the U.S. Drought Monitor, updated Thursday morning.
Authors of the Drought Monitor measure conditions on a scale of D0 (abnormally dry) to D4 (exceptional drought) based on a number of factors including precipitation, streamflow, reservoir levels, temperature, soil moisture and vegetation health.
Following the rain, Southern West Virginia counties improved this week by one or two categories compared to last week, but this week was “status quo” for Northern West Virginia which got less rain, said Kevin Law, a climatologist and professor at Marshall University.
“Typically, the U.S. Drought Monitor, they’re pretty reluctant in doing a rapid improvement,” Law said. “In other words, they don’t just take it from D4 to nothing in a week’s time. It’s usually like a stair step kind of effect. It’ll take multiple weeks of rainfall to kind of take care of that.”
Areas farther north of Parkersburg and Flatwoods got half an inch to an inch of rain “at best,” Kiebler said.
“From Braxton County, the central part of the state, northward, a lot of those areas were pretty much status quo,” Law said. “Because, again, these areas had less than two inches of rainfall this past week. That’s just not sufficient enough to take care of [the drought] when we’re already in D3, D4 drought.”
Jackson County remains among the hardest hit areas of the state. Some farmers there have been hauling water to their crops and selling off their livestock for lack of water or hay for them. This week Jackson County is among four counties where the majority of the area is experiencing D4, exceptional drought.
Nicholas County, where the city of Richwood was running out of water last month, is mostly still experiencing severe drought, according to the Drought Monitor.
Kanawha County is currently split between having extreme and exceptional drought conditions, while the majority of Cabell County has extreme drought conditions.
Law said this year’s drought is the worst the state has experienced in at least the last 25 years since the Drought Monitor was created. He said he expects the drought conditions to improve later this fall.
“Looking toward a weak La Nina, we tend to see more wintertime precipitation, at least along the Ohio Valley, so that will provide some improvement there,” Law said. “So I think you’ll start to see overall state improvement as we go later in the fall over the winter months.”
State of emergency not extended
Even if the drought conditions improve this fall and winter, the damage has been done for many West Virginia farmers. And now that a state of emergency declaration has expired, West Virginia farmers may not have access to all the funding assistance they could have been eligible for.
An emergency declaration allows the state to access different pools of money and resources to respond to emergencies.
Gov. Jim Justice first declared a state of emergency for all 55 counties because of the drought on July 26, then extended for another month on Aug. 23.
Extending the state of emergency again would have required action by the state Legislature. Despite a request from the state Department of Agriculture, though, Justice did not include it on the call for this week’s special session. The governor’s office did not respond to a question about why the extension was not on the special session call.
Lora Walker, general counsel for the Department of Agriculture, said Thursday she does not know why extending the state of emergency was left off the special session call, and she wishes that it were included.
“I understand that negotiations are still ongoing, so I remain hopeful that the Legislature and the state of West Virginia can recognize that our farmers are suffering,” Walker said. “Even a symbolic declaration of emergency, in my opinion, would be better than nothing at all. Because it’s not as though it requires them to provide money in that regard, but it would at least be some acknowledgement.”
According to the Department of Agriculture, as of last week the United States Department of Agriculture’s Farm Service Agency had paid out $2.4 million to West Virginia farmers through their disaster relief programs. The West Virginia Conservation Agency had also distributed more than $76,000 in assistance for producers.
Extending the state of emergency would hypothetically open the door to state assistance to farmers.
The end of the state of emergency won’t cut off existing federal funding, but it could mean they won’t be eligible for any new federal programs that could be on the way, she said.
“If we look at the situation around the country right now, with mass devastation across the South after Hurricane Helene, I would certainly be of the mind that there would be more federal programs coming, if not directly, even prior to the hurricane, in response to this drought in West Virginia, has been absolutely devastating to our farmers,” Walker said.
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