Flood Zones and the Cherry River in Nicholas County, West Virginia

June 23, 2016: a flood severe enough to move a town's schools

Intense, slow-moving convective storms along a stationary front produced historic flooding across central West Virginia on June 23, 2016, and Richwood -- in the southeastern corner of Nicholas County, along the Cherry River -- was among the hardest-hit communities in the state. The flood destroyed roughly 100 homes and businesses along with the town's water intake and sewer lines, and it destroyed both Richwood Middle School and Richwood High School outright. The reason those schools couldn't simply be rebuilt on their original sites is the specific, checkable fact that matters for a land buyer: FEMA determined the original school sites sat within the Cherry River's regulatory floodway, part of the federally mapped Special Flood Hazard Area, and required the replacement schools be built at a new location outside that area before releasing reconstruction funding.

The federal response reflected the scale of the damage: West Virginia received more than $131 million in FEMA funding specifically to replace the Richwood schools destroyed in the flood, and the U.S. Geological Survey and other federal partners produced detailed geospatial flood-inundation mapping for the Cherry River through Richwood and Fenwick directly from the 2016 event -- shapefiles covering mapped flood-area boundaries, high-water-mark points, and flood-depth rasters, the kind of granular data that normally only exists for a river reach that has experienced a genuinely significant, federally studied flood.

Not a closed chapter: an active federal mitigation project

This is not purely historical. FEMA issued a public notice for a draft Environmental Assessment covering a Cherry River flood-mitigation project as recently as April 2023, indicating that federal floodplain-management work along this specific river reach is an ongoing, active process rather than a finished episode from a decade ago. For a buyer, that has a practical implication: the current floodway and Special Flood Hazard Area boundaries for the Cherry River through Richwood may be subject to updates as this mitigation work proceeds, and the map that applied in 2016 or even a few years ago should not be assumed to be the current, controlling one for a specific parcel today.

It's also worth being precise about geography here: this is a Cherry River/Richwood-specific hazard, not a countywide one. Summersville Lake and the broader Gauley River corridor discussed on this county's hub page function differently -- the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' Summersville Dam is itself a flood-control structure moderating downstream flow on the Gauley, which is a different hydrological picture than the free-flowing Cherry River watershed that produced the 2016 Richwood flood. A parcel's proximity to Summersville Lake does not tell you anything about its Cherry River flood-zone exposure, and vice versa -- each needs to be checked on its own terms.

What to check before buying

• Pull the current FEMA Flood Insurance Rate Map (FIRM) panel for the specific parcel -- through FEMA's Map Service Center or the Nicholas County Commission -- rather than relying on the 2016 event maps described above, since the floodway boundary may have been updated as part of the ongoing mitigation project.
• If a parcel is anywhere near the Cherry River through or near Richwood, specifically ask whether it falls within the regulatory floodway (the most restrictive designation, where new construction is heavily limited) versus the broader Special Flood Hazard Area (where construction is possible but typically requires flood insurance and elevation compliance) versus outside any mapped flood hazard entirely.
• Ask the Nicholas County Commission or Richwood's own city government whether the Cherry River flood-mitigation project has produced any updated maps, buyout parcels, or new floodplain ordinance provisions since the 2023 draft Environmental Assessment.
• For a parcel elsewhere in the county near Summersville Lake or the Gauley River, evaluate flood exposure separately and on its own terms -- the dam's flood-control function there is a materially different situation from the Cherry River watershed.
• If a lender is involved, expect a flood-zone determination as part of underwriting regardless of what this page or any single map says -- treat that determination, not a general reputation for flooding, as the operative answer for insurance and buildability.