The Nicholas County Nursing Home and Rehabilitation Center in Richwood, from which 97 patients were evacuated by members of its staff as floodwaters from the Cherry River swept through it on June 23, will be rebuilt and reopened, but it's not certain when or where, the chief operating officer for the chain that owns and manages the facility said on Tuesday.
"It's important to us for everyone in the county to know that we're going to rebuild," said Gregg Calvert, COO for the Skokie, Illinois-based Platinum Healthcare LLC, which operates more than 20 nursing homes, rehabilitation centers and senior residential facilities nationwide.
Calvert said that a team brought in to clean up and restore the flood-battered Richwood facility stopped work late last week to allow Platinum personnel and insurance adjusters to analyze damage and get estimates for repair and replacement costs.
"It looks like the cost of repairing and replacing could exceed the cost of rebuilding, but we're waiting for the final numbers to come in from our two insurance carriers" for a final analysis, he said.
"We're 100 percent sure we'll reopen in Nicholas County, but right now, we're unsure where and how," Calvert said. "We have a call with the State of West Virginia coming up to discuss the process for rebuilding in a different location. There's a process we have to work through to do that."
Assuming the facility will be rebuilt, instead of repaired, "it will be out of the flood zone, or on as high a piece of ground as we can get," Calvert said. "Everybody's goal is to rebuild on a new site, but we have to make sure that it makes sense to relocate."
Platinum will work with the Federal Emergency Management Agency and state emergency officials to make sure the company has access to any funding related to the flood for which it may qualify, Calvert said.
While some of the nursing home's residents were able to be loaded into buses and a van before rising water levels made that option impossible, others had to be physically carried from the building by members of the staff, who used a rear exit to wade into chest-deep floodwater. From there, patients were placed on a steep, grassy embankment, where nursing home staffers and neighborhood volunteers carried or led them to a temporary shelter in Liberty Baptist Church, a few hundred feet away.
The residents slept on pews and made do without electricity and a water source to operate toilets until the National Guard and other rescue personnel arrived at the scene.
Reach Rick Steelhammer at rsteelhammer@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-5169 or follow @rsteelhammer on Twitter.