Photos by Jeanna Duerscherl | The Roanoke Times

Robyn Whorley pets her children's dogs in her hotel room. Whorley's children are staying in rooms next to hers during the holiday.

Robyn Whorley (background) talks with her children (from left) Sara Meador, Ashley Whorley and Jon Meador in the hotel room where she has lived for a year.

Robyn Whorley has to forgo the traditional tree this year as she spends Christmas in a hotel. Whorley said she cannot live in her home after heating oil was mistakenly pumped into her basement last year.

LYNCHBURG -- Robyn Whorley and her three adult children cannot go home for the holidays.

Instead of spending Christmas in the family's Bedford County home, they are bunking in a cluster of rooms at a Lynchburg efficiency hotel, where Whorley has spent the past 363 nights.

She has lived there since last December, when an oil company mistakenly pumped more than 100 gallons of heating oil into her basement through a pipe that had not been sealed when the oil tank was removed. She says that the contents of her home remain permeated with a pungent petroleum odor, and she is suing Davenport Oil Co. of Chatham and Sweet's Heating and Air Conditioning of Moneta for $500,000 because she says her home is uninhabitable.

A representative from Davenport declined to comment, citing pending litigation.

Whorley son's Jon Meador, 24, has traveled to Lynchburg from culinary school in Charleston, S.C., for the holidays. Daughter Sara Meador, 22, flew in from Wisconsin, where she attends graduate school. And the youngest, 20-year-old Ashley Whorley, a Virginia Tech student, came in from Blacksburg.

This is the first year the family has not had a live Christmas tree. There is an 18-inch artificial tree sitting on a tabletop in Whorley's room, with miniature stockings bearing the family's names dangling from the table's edge.

In a holiday season that feels anything but traditional, Whorley continued the ritual of buying each child a new ornament and marking it with the date. But it did little to detract from the oily odors that she said ruined two decades' worth of ornaments, many handmade when the children were small.

"We always decorate the tree together and make fun of each other's ornaments," Ashley Whorley said.

Objects of the family's good-natured ridicule include Meador's pudding-cup bell decorated with glitter glue and a Santa Claus, made by Jon Whorley, that is missing several facial features.

"They are still irreplaceable," their mother said.

This year, they have store-bought snowman ornaments: Ashley Whorley and Meador's are talking on cellphones and holding coffee cups, Jon Whorley's is cooking s'mores and their mom's has an upside-down umbrella.

"Because my life is upside down," she said.

Davenport is paying the family's lodging expenses while Robyn Whorley continues to pay her mortgage. The strain has not been financial only -- Whorley has struggled physically and emotionally. The hotel bed is uncomfortable, and she said not being able to return home has taxed her emotions.

Life in a hotel room proved lonely.

Whorley, the head of the guidance department at Amherst County High School, recently joined a gym. The membership has helped a lot, she said, by giving her somewhere to go after work.

"I had nothing to do, nowhere to go," she said. "People [at the gym] are like, 'Hey, Robyn, how are you?' "

Even though Whorley's parents live nearby, being away from home and from her neighbors left her feeling isolated. The children picked up on it quickly. Jon Whorley takes more of his mother's phone calls, Meador talks to her at least three times a day, and Ashley Whorley comes in from Blacksburg whenever she can.

Robyn Whorley just wants her life to return to normal, but it does not seem as though that will happen right away.

Air samples collected in September by two companies -- one hired by Davenport's insurance company and another hired by Whorley -- detected "statistically insignificant" levels of naphthalene, a chemical potentially related to heating oil, said Don Edge of the state Department of Environmental Quality. He said that once the house has been ventilated for two to three weeks, Whorley can return home.

But her attorney, Sam Patel, said every door and window in the house was opened for three weeks and the odor remains.

While the level of naphthalene present in the house exceeds Environmental Protection Agency standards, a person has "a greater risk of exposure from pumping gasoline into a vehicle than the concentrations of chemicals detected within the house," Edge said.

That is unacceptable to Patel, who said his client's life has been "sheer hell" for the past year. He expects to appear before a judge in Bedford County Circuit Court in January for a trial date to be set. In the meantime Whorley will stay where she is.

"Her home is unsafe. She is living in a hotel. There is no end in sight," Patel said.