CHARLESTON, W.Va. – After devastating floods damaged large swaths of West Virginia earlier this year, the state Department of Transportation decided that it needed to change the way it responds to high-water events.
DOT Secretary Stephen Todd Rumbaugh was forced to act quickly when significant flooding struck the southern coalfield counties less than one month after he was appointed by Governor Patrick Morrisey.
“What was done in February was what had always been done in the past. When that event got done, we sat down with our folks and discussed what we should do in order to improve—to make things better,” he said before the Joint Committee on Flooding during interim legislative committee meetings on Tuesday.
More floods in Ohio and Marion Counties months later led DOT to implement some of the planned improvements developed after the February event. Rumbaugh believes the response improved, but there’s still room to get better.
“We learned a lot from that event and hope to improve, and I think we did come the June one, but even with the June event, I believe we learned a lot there too,” he said.
Increased manpower is one of the most significant changes Rumbaugh and the DOT elected to make after seeing the devastation dealt by the February floods. Figures shown to the Joint Committee on Flooding reflect a major increase in response to the June floods.
“While it was a very small area impacted, you will see that numbers that we used here are equivalent to some of the larger areas in the February event, so we really brought in folks from outside of their districts to hit things fast and hard and to get things back open a lot faster,” Rumbaugh said.
Initial response is not the only aspect of flood relief that DOT is working on improvements for. Rumbaugh told the committee that finding a way to prioritize road projects that resulted from flooding is a focus moving forward.
“Our view is when you have an emergency and the flooding events happen, these projects go to the front of the line. We’re going to try to get the damaged areas back up to what they were prior to the event in order to restore service as quickly as possible for those folks,” he said.
Rumbaugh made his plan clear: the DOT wants to make comprehensive changes to how it responds to flood events around the state.
“We’re changing how fast we move in. We’re changing how we deal with the projects once we have the initial push-through. We’re staying there. We’re trying to hit it and get everything back up to normal as quickly as possible,” he said.
Interim committee meetings continue at the state capitol through Tuesday.