RECOVERY 

During the early morning hours of August 28th, a ribbon of heavy showers spawned just above the southern West Virginia coalfields and propagated northeastward into the central portions of the state. An inverted surface trough feature festered over the Central Appalachians and was the primary culprit behind this swath of slow moving and heavy rainfall. Precipitation amounts recorded by local weather stations were on the upward of 3 to 5 inches from Lincoln and Boone County all the way up to Braxton County. This brought upon an extensive amount of flood damage across the state as creeks and streams were quickly inundated with water, spilling onto local roads and into nearby homes. Previous rainfall from August 26th did not help matters, as the ground had little time to recover and could not support the quick inundation of rain on the morning of the 28th.

The hardest hit area from this event took place in eastern Kanawha County, where the Winifrede, Coal Grove, and Chelyan areas observed million dollars worth of flood damage. An NWS Storm Survey team went out to these areas the next day to see first hand the amount of damage caused by the flooding. In Kanawha County alone, 3 homes were deemed destroyed, along with a fire station and a local church. An additional 50 to 100 homes observed at least minor to major flooding due to the close proximity of the houses to the swollen creeks, including Slaughter Creek, Kelleys Creek, Little Creek, and Fields Creek. Several cars were swept up by the floodwaters and became submerged in the creeks, while many of the roads within the local communities were washed out and destroyed. 

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Source: NWS-RLX