STILL WAITING — Gov. Patrick Morrisey takes questions from the press Tuesday morning following a press conference at West Virginia International Yeager Airport in Charleston. -- Steven Allen Adams

CHARLESTON — While President Donald Trump issued a federal disaster declaration for Texas within days after substantial flash flooding, Gov. Patrick Morrisey is still working on receiving a disaster declaration more than three weeks after flash flooding in Ohio and Marion counties in West Virginia.

Speaking Tuesday following an announcement at West Virginia International Yeager Airport, Morrisey said he was following up with White House officials and the Federal Emergency Management Agency to speed up the federal disaster approval process.

“I’m going to get back to the office and launch another call in there, because we’re going to push,” the governor said.

Trump signed a federal disaster declaration for Kerr County, Texas, on July 6 following a major flash flooding event that occurred between July 2 and July 4. According to media accounts, approximately 108 people were killed in Central Texas, with 87 deaths in Kerr County alone, with an unknown number of people still missing. Many of those deaths were children and adult staff at a summer camp.

Nine lives were lost in the Valley Grove and Triadelphia areas of Ohio County on June 14. According to the National Weather Service, between 2.5 and 4 inches of rain fell in Ohio County in 30 minutes that night. Additional storms hit Marion County throughout June 15, with approximately 3 inches of rain dropping throughout the day, causing significant damage to homes, businesses, and roads.

At the time, Morrisey said that FEMA officials were on the ground providing assistance and conducting damage assessments. Speaking Tuesday, Morrisey said some of the delay in a federal disaster declaration was due to additional information needed by FEMA.

“We obviously had a lot of conversations early on with them, and they were going through processing, analyzing the data in terms of some of the financial thresholds that they thought had to be met,” Morrisey said. “When I have more on that, I’ll report back to you.”

West Virginia received a federal disaster declaration on Feb. 27 for McDowell, Mercer, Mingo and Wyoming counties following flash flooding that hit a 13-county region in Southern West Virginia between Feb. 14 through Feb. 16. Those floods killed two grandparents and one of their grandchildren.

According to a review of federal disaster declarations on FEMA’s website, most federal disaster declarations for states have come more than a month after the reported natural disaster except in the case of last week’s Texas flooding and natural disasters in Kentucky and Tennessee at the beginning of April. Nine major disaster declarations were issued on May 23 for natural disasters — ranging from severe winter storms, wind damage, tornadoes, and flooding — that occurred in March and April.