The other ledger for West Virginia: the highest share of poor-rated bridges in the nation (19%, TRIP), $15.7 billion in documented water needs against a ~$5.5 billion annual state budget, and 419 high-hazard dams — nearly a third of them with no inspection in the national inventory. And two honest counterweights, printed not buried: a housing stock that models as surplus even while its poorest renters face a 24,787-home shortage, and a power forecast that splits by territory. Every figure is sourced, dated, and labeled — counted, modeled, or assessed.
How to read this page: the class chip on every measure is the honesty label. Counted = an inspection or enumeration record. Modeled = a study's projection or risk score — printed with the modeler's name. Assessed = a structured survey of required investment — needs as documented, not measurements of decay. Figures keep the form their source gave them; years are printed on every measure.
Click any category to expand it — every measure with its figure, what it means in plain language, and its source.
Bridges & roads — edition choice, disclosed. The measures use TRIP's April 2025 West Virginia report, whose full state tables could be verified. TRIP's April 2026 key-facts update reports 54% of major roads poor/mediocre, 18% of bridges poor and $848 per driver on a broader road base; it is named in the category note rather than silently mixed with the 2025 tables.
Water. Both figures come from one document — the Water Program Portal's February 2026 fact sheet compiling EPA's DWINSA and Clean Watersheds surveys ($4.6B + $11.1B = $15.7B) — so the pair is internally consistent. EPA-cited reporting elsewhere states the drinking-water figure as ~$4.5B; the difference is noted on the measure itself.
Food. No current statewide USDA Atlas count of residents in low-income/low-access tracts could be sourced, so no food-desert resident count is printed. The two food-insecurity measures use different instruments (USDA data via the Legislature's 2023 STEP note; Feeding America's 2021 model) and are printed side by side with their years, never blended.
Dams. The National Inventory figures reach this page through a secondary compilation (GetMyBoat's Risky Reservoirs analysis of NID data, following AP's method) — flagged 'industry-analysis' in the data. The poor-condition figure is published as a share (6.7%) and is NOT multiplied into a dam count; the 29.1% not-inspected share is the measure the compilation supports most directly.
Housing — a surplus and a shortage, both real. Freddie Mac's model finds West Virginia oversupplied overall (the nation's largest modelled surplus), while NLIHC finds a 24,787-home shortage at the extremely low-income floor. The category prints the NLIHC floor measures and carries the Freddie Mac finding in its note.
Hospitals. Chartis publishes West Virginia's vulnerable share as a 10–15% band, not a count — the page prints the band. The Sheps Center's 15% highest-distress share comes from its 2025 analysis prepared for U.S. Senate requesters.