(Editor's Notes by Christina Myer - Photo Illustration - MetroCreativeConnection)

When natural disaster strikes in West Virginia, you’ll often find on these pages encouragement to help if you can. What happened last weekend in Ohio and Marion counties was enough to make me wonder how there would be enough help available.

News outlets reported the eight deaths (I’m writing this Thursday afternoon. Officials are speculating there may be more victims to be found) in Ohio County are the “largest mass casualty” event in the county’s history.

In the county where I spent my teen years and where much of my family still lives, there is devastation that eclipses anything they’ve seen before. As I read the lists of roads and intersections still closed I could remember having driven each of them. They are the main routes and back roads of the adventures I and my friends went on during the years that helped us figure out who we were.

In news story after news story, there are familiar names, businesses owned by classmates and now in ruins — muddy, twisted or just plain washed away. The animal shelter in Triadelphia is where one of the sassiest dogs I’ve ever known made it clear that he was coming home with me.

Stories about buildings holding organizations that will have to relocate brought back memories of previous floods that hit some of those same places. This one was too much.

Thousands of people are still without power. By Thursday, nearly 700 had submitted assistance damage surveys that will help Gov. Patrick Morrisey in his push to get Federal Emergency Management Agency help to the area quickly.

As that work continues, Ohio County Emergency Management Agency Director Lou Vargo said ATVs are being dispatched to go up into some areas and feeder streets that extend away from U.S. Route 40.

Good. There are people up those roads who probably can’t (and maybe won’t) ask for help unless another human seeks them out and talks them through it.

“It was pretty terrifying,” said T.J. Parsons, an Elm Grove resident who has been carrying mud out his basement two buckets at a time. “The creek has gotten high a million times and I wasn’t worried. Then, all of a sudden, within like 10 or 20 minutes, it was up to my yard. Then it was up to my house. Then I had six feet of water in my basement, churning things around.”

And while my ability to picture the neighborhood Parsons lives in — if you’ve ever passed through Wheeling on I-70 and glanced over the guardrails on your way up to The Highlands, you can, too — has made me feel the need to help more deeply than usual, I have to remember something else.

In Marion County, in southern West Virginia, in North Carolina … everywhere these natural disasters devastate communities, there is someone like me, writing their own very personal perspective on what has gone wrong, desperate to help and spur others to do the same.

Particularly in the case of flooding and mudslides, we’ve gotten so used to it in our region that those disasters happening more than a couple of hours away often prompt only the briefest response from outside the affected communities.

Then we sit back and watch while we assume state and federal government officials will sort out the rest.

“I think the community is in good hands,” Morrisey said in Wheeling Wednesday. “I think a lot of people have been working closely together, and it has been nice to see.

“We’re all on the same team when we come into the room, and that’s quite refreshing.”

I have no doubt state government and the West Virginia National Guard will do all in their power to help for as long as is needed. I have no doubt Morrisey will present an air-tight case when he speaks with President Donald Trump and U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

And I know there’s nothing helpful about insisting every individual act with a deep and personal sense of urgency when news of any natural disaster arrives. We’d all be broke and exhausted.

But in this case, call it selfish, I’ll throw out one more plea. If you can help the folks up the river in the coming days and weeks, please do.

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I can’t sign off without saying how proud I am of my colleagues at the Wheeling and Martins Ferry newspapers. They have done an excellent, thorough job on this story; and they are a reminder our community newspapers are staffed by smart, talented, dedicated people who care both about the regions in which they work AND about doing that work right. Thank you all for the story you are bringing to the rest of us.

Christina Myer is executive editor of The Parkersburg News and Sentinel. She can be reached via e-mail at cmyer@newsandsentinel.com.