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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 [98], Line —— 4.0p —— Norm PgEn [98], The rechannelization kept St. Paul from being underwater. THIRTEEN Regional Planning and River Politics Frank Kilgore: Obviously, the reason that people suffer from flooding is they build in the floodplain. Lacking a lot of flat, developable land, our early settlers settled close to the rivers and streams. So in doing that, whenever you have a major flood event, you always had major damage. Fortunately through FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency] and state emergency agencies, when there is a flood now, rebuilding in a flood zone is off-limits. You can’t get a permit. So that’s going to help in the future. Another flood prevention factor that we are undergoing is we had the Clinch River rechanneled in St. Paul, which has stopped any major flooding. And, of course, I guess Grundy, Virginia, was the most devastated in the 1977 flood, and the entire town’s being relocated and the town flood-proofed. But just the fact that new homes can’t be built in floodplains and that old homes, if they’re devastated by flooding, have to be rebuilt outside the floodplain will eventually cure this longstanding problem. The ’77 flood crested at thirty-six feet; ’77 was a hundred-year flood. I guess it was bigger than any the last century. And it happened to be the same year that the federal strip mine act [SMCRA] went into effect. Of course, it took awhile for the federal strip mine act to have an effect on the watersheds because you had so much abandoned land that had never been reclaimed, and some pitifully reclaimed land under state regulations. So I think all those factors together are going to slowly but surely reduce the number of flood problems that we have. And then we have a weather pattern in far southwest Virginia that’s a little different from the rest of the state, particularly Buchanan County, where it’s the head of the Big Sandy watershed. And there are some divide ridges between them and Kentucky and West Virginia. It appears that the Hurley 98 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 [99], Line —— 0.0p —— Norm PgEn [99], region particularly—that rain gets dumped into that region—seven inches at one time just recently, or maybe it was more than that. Maybe it was thirteen inches, maybe it was thirteen inches in seven hours or seven inches in thirteen hours. I can’t remember, but people died, and they are still reeling from the effect of that. The school washed out, the whole community washed out. And that was the result of a traditional weather pattern. That’s not just a freak weather pattern, but Buchanan County is hit with floods yearly. In fact just last week, the little community of Council was flooded; nobody else had a flood. So there’s something about being at the headwaters of a huge watershed that’s creating a little havoc in Buchanan County. I guess it’s where the moisture-laden clouds are coming on up that watershed, and then when they’ve got to go up, raise up to get over the ridgelines of the headwaters, why it just dumps their load. And so they have a particular problem, and they’ve got the steepest slopes, and they’ve got the most narrow river bottoms, so they have very little flat land to build on.1 And traditionally too, the coal companies have always owned the huge majority of surface land. And what they owned couldn’t be built upon, and what they didn’t own was already owned by folks along the creeks. So you couldn’t buy land outside the floodplain a lot of times. The rechannelization kept St. Paul from being underwater during the ’77 flood. St. Paul always flooded before then when it rained. [According to Charles McConnell, houses had been relocated out of the flood zone by 1977 as part of the rechannelization project; however, the channel itself was not changed until 1981.] LeRoy...

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