The night of June 14, catastrophic floods swept through the northern panhandle of West Virginia about 50 miles west of Pittsburgh. A powerful storm brought up to four inches of rain in 40 minutes, flooding the city of Wheeling along the Ohio River and deluging smaller communities near the West Virginia-Ohio border. On U.S. Route 40, also known as National Road, streams overflowed, swamping homes and businesses. By Monday, Ohio County officials confirmed nine deaths, declaring the flood the largest mass casualty event the county had seen.
In Pittsburgh, over Father’s Day weekend and amidst No Kings Day protests, news of the flooding scarcely broke through, Nicky D., part of the mutual aid group Pittsburgh Disaster Solidarity tells Pittsburgh City Paper
“Almost nobody outside of my mutual aid service even knows that this happened, and we’re like an hour away,” Nicky says. “It’s been overlooked at this point.”
Along with Steel City Organizing Radical Community Health (SCORCH), a Pittsburgh street medic collective, Nicky and Pittsburgh Disaster Solidarity connected with the Greater Wheeling-based Ohio Valley Mutual Aid (OVMA) and began organizing supply drives to the area. Pittsburghers donated flood clean-up supplies including rags, shovels, boots, and dehumidifiers, and Disaster Solidarity delivered them to OVMA. After weeks of collection, the group put out a call for volunteers to travel from Pittsburgh to West Virginia twice a month to aid with clean-up and site damage assessment.
“My experience of Wheeling [is] the general public seems to be very positive in how this Ohio Valley Mutual Aid group has sort of stepped up,” Nicky says.
Pittsburgh Disaster Solidarity officially formed after Hurricane Helene, the devastating tropical cyclone that caused catastrophic damage across the Southeastern U.S. and killed at least 250 people in September 2024. Pittsburgh volunteers including Nicky went to aid recovery efforts in Asheville, N.C., which sits 300 miles inland from the Atlantic coast and didn’t anticipate severe storm damage.
“I don’t really have words to describe what I saw down there, but there were whole towns that were devastated,” Nicky recalls. He was also struck by the government’s less-than-urgent response.
“Seeing these big water tankers just being guarded by the military, just sitting there — you know, people did not have water for a very long time,” he tells City Paper.
Witnessing the devastation alongside lagging official recovery efforts, Nicky and a group of 8 to 10 volunteers decided to make Pittsburgh Disaster Solidarity permanent. Emily Manno, a nurse who also works with Food Not Bombs, and Karl Koerner, an environmental engineer, also saw the ongoing need.
Mutual aid — a form of reciprocal exchange where networks and communities share resources — has become a buzzword since the pandemic, Nicky says, even as it can still be misunderstood.
“There have been groups of marginalized people doing [this] forever,” Nicky says. “They just didn’t call it mutual aid.”
Nicky also co-created the Our Streets Collective, which works to build a network of care for people facing homelessness and addiction, and sometimes, “it’s just seen as a charity for people that have less, when, in my opinion, that’s not really it,” he explains. “We’re also trying to empower them to not feel like this is a power imbalance … We all need help, and the more we normalize helping and being helped, it starts to shift society.”
In West Virginia, though Governor Patrick Morrisey declared a state of emergency and requested a major disaster declaration, which would bring federal disaster assistance through FEMA, President Trump didn’t approve the request until five weeks later, on July 23.
Nicky says with federal support largely absent, “it really looked like a little bit of county and state disaster cleanup, [but] it was mostly just people in the community coming out to help their neighbors.”
After moving past the initial disaster, efforts have shifted to mucking out homes, removing debris, and remediating mold. The Pittsburgh group is still looking for volunteers and accepting food, clothing, and supply donations.
“Regardless of what people might think, FEMA is going to be less and less effective, and that’s going to trickle down to the state, the county, the city, and there will be less money and resources for disaster relief and a whole host of other issues,” Nicky says.
Pittsburgh Disaster Solidarity believes the mutual aid model will become more necessary in a time of increasing natural disasters.
One reason the West Virginia floods fell out of the news cycle, Nicky believes, is they came during a summer where flash flood warnings were issued in the Pittsburgh area at their highest frequency in over 20 years — and only weeks before deadly flooding in Central Texas, and torrential rainfall in the mid-Atlantic that submerged New York City subway stations.
Pittsburghers recently had their own brush with extreme weather during the severe thunderstorm on April 29. After the storm passed, Disaster Solidarity “reactivated” to bring portable power stations to those without electricity, allowing them to charge cell phones, keep food refrigerated longer, and meet medical needs.
“We’re square into climate collapse,” Nicky says, also repeating Pittsburgh Disaster Solidarity’s credo. “We are all living in the disaster that is capitalism.”
Looking toward medium- or longer-term goals, the group, Nicky says, is hoping to shift from a reactive to more proactive model. This includes building out a regional network of mutual aid organizations and creating a Pittsburgh “cache” of resources that would already be on hand during a disaster.
Disaster Solidarity is also hoping to build capacity with more local volunteers. For those wanting to get involved, an oft-repeated line among mutual aid organizations is the first step is getting to know your neighbors.
“Anybody, like anybody, can do mutual aid,” Nicky says.
Along with OVMA, Disaster Solidarity recently tabled at Pittsburgh’s Really Really Free Market, something of a hybrid between a mutual aid hub and a neighborhood yard sale. Pittsburghers — including one with a pet snake in tow — stopped by the table to pick up free medical supplies and hear about the groups’ work. One person hadn’t heard about the West Virginia floods.
Koerner also offered to charge devices on a solar-powered portable power station, the same one used after Pittsburgh’s April storm. In the first hour, Disaster Solidarity’s sign-up sheet began to fill.
“You know, it’s Pittsburgh,” Koerner tells CP. “We want to help our neighbors.”
This article appears in Aug 6-12, 2025.
