Larry Helms joined the Wheeling Fire Department in October 1986 and was named chief in September 2007, and this one blaze that destroyed the former Island Exposition Hall involved the largest structure of his 34-year tenure.
According to scanner communication between Ohio County 911 dispatchers and first responders, crews were first released before 8:30 p.m. last night from the scene of the massive fire, but the Ladder 1 and Ladder 6 companies remained to continue efforts to completely extinguished the blaze. Once maintained, a skeleton crew remained on scene.
Those are most of the drugs that have killed in this Upper Ohio Valley, according to law enforcement officials in Ohio, Marshall, and Belmont counties. The last decade, though, has been dominated by overdoses involving opioids, including heroin because snorting or injecting the Schedule 1 narcotic is much cheaper than prescription pills.
People pass away every day here in the Upper Ohio Valley, and 99.99 percent of those deaths only are mentioned on a newspaper’s Obituary Page, but in 2019 the public was shocked by a pair of reports out of Marshall and Ohio counties.
We know what patching a pothole looks like, and we’ve witnessed new bridge construction, but never before have residents of the Upper Ohio Valley seen our roadways in such a rotted condition.
