MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Monongalia County emergency crews continue to assess the damage caused by flash flooding on Sunday that led to damaged roadways and flooded homes.
MECCA 911 Director Jim Smith offered an update on what parts of the county were affected the most by the Father’s Day storms, where over three inches of rain falling in less than an hour caused several road closures and reports of flooded homes. This resulted in damage to close to a dozen homes and businesses, with high winds causing an apartment building to be struck by fallen debris. This is despite no injuries being reported countywide.
“Most of them seem to have occurred in the Westover, Granville area, River Road sections,” Smith said. “We do have six reported small slides that came off the hillsides into the roadways. Four of those were out on Route 19, two of them were on River Road.”
According to Smith, the majority of the flooding was reported around the Granville and Westover area, with flooding also reported around the Evansdale neighborhood. This included water levels as high as several feet along Patteson Drive near the West Virginia University campus, rock slides affecting portions of roads around the Westover area, and fallen trees that caused numerous roads around the Morgantown area to be temporarily closed. Several dozen homes also experienced flooding during the short but intense Sunday rainstorm.
“(There were) 15 reported flooding incidents of roadways being covered in water,” Smith said. “We had 12 reported incidents of water that got in the homes.”
Smith also noted that fallen trees caused close to a half dozen roads to be closed as a result of high winds that were a part of the Sunday storms, with other damaging Monongalia County properties. In Westover, one of those trees
damage an apartment complex with people inside at the time, but no injuries were reported from the incident. Most of the roads affected by down trees were addressed and reopened by Sunday evening.
“A tree came down and hit an apartment building in Westover—it was reported damaged to that apartment building,” Smith said. “A lot of debris in the roadways.”
As a result of the damage seen in some portions of the county, Smith reported that certain roads will be closed temporarily to address slippage that have made certain roads unsafe. This includes portions of River Road which had rockslides along various portions of the road during the storms. With no injuries or significant damage outside of one apartment building and a few roads affected by storm caused slippage, Monongalia County Emergency officials are ready to move on to the clean-up phase of what was a large amount of rain to hit the area.
“Lower River Road will probably be closed for a couple of days.” said Smith “They’re going to watch that slip a little bit because they still had debris coming off the hillside.”
Smith also reported that crews from the City of Westover and the Town of Granville began clean-up operations Monday morning.