Search crews will again go out and look for Mykala Phillips, the 14-year-old girl who went missing when the late-June floods destroyed her home in White Sulphur Springs, next week.
Bill Kershner, the coordinator for the state's search and rescue operations, said Monday, the day after the Phillips family held a celebration of the girl's life, that crews will go out again, possibly on Aug. 9, to look for her body after excavators have removed some more of the debris from the area along the Greenbrier River.
"It's not that we have quit, there's just no reason to keep doing the same thing over and over again when we've already looked through the area," Kershner said. "We're going back with a few dogs, and we'll work our way back from the scene where she went in the water."
Kershner said there are still large piles of debris stacked in Greenbrier County, some piled as high as 30 feet. He thinks they might find Mykala's body buried in those piles of branches and silt.
He and other emergency officials in the state have reached out to search and rescue experts across the country to see if there were any search techniques or new technologies they could try to implement.
Considering that Lisa Blankenship - the mother from Renick who also washed away during the flood - was found 30 miles from her home down the Greenbrier River, officials assume Mykala could have washed far away, too.
Kershner, who has long been involved with search and rescue in the state, said he can remember only one time since he has worked for the state where a person who went missing during a flood wasn't found. In the floods of 1985, a couple went missing and were never found.
Still, Kershner said he doesn't consider the search for them really over, even though crews are not actively searching for them.
"The thing is, you're looking for an unknown," Kershner said. "It's not like, 'Okay, I know there's a needle in this haystack. We're going to find the needle in this haystack.' We're starting with the premise of we don't know if there's a needle in this haystack or one of the ten haystacks down the road."
Reach Jake Jarvis at jake.jarvis@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-7939 or follow @NewsroomJake on Twitter.