Formoso, KA
The New Water Line: In Formoso, Kan., even the kids pitched in
In recent years, Formoso’s water lines, dating back to 1929, were breaking about five times a year. When one burst, the entire town was without water, sometimes for days, until it was fixed.
“You never knew if the water would work,” recalls Mayor Vickie Stafford. “When you wake up and there’s no water, it’s a hassle.”
Hiring a contractor to replace the lines, however, meant increasing household water bills $60 a month, and not everyone could afford that. So townspeople decided to tackle the task themselves, with some financial help from the federal government.
The only problem was the town didn’t have matching funds to receive a $274,000 federal grant to replace the lines. So townspeople put together a plan to trade manpower for money.
“Everybody was tired of the breaks and was ready to do something about it,” Stafford says. “This opportunity came along and we jumped at it.”
James Haskins, the town’s maintenance man and project foreman, created a list of jobs, and townspeople—ages 8 to 80—signed up. Machine and backhoe operators, cooks, bookkeepers, engineers, a public relations person, and even kids pitched in.
“We were fortunate that some of the volunteers had construction experience installing phone lines and pipe lines,” says Nancy Spiegel, who handled public relations.
Nearly 100 people worked six months to replace nearly three miles of 6-inch plastic pipe, along with new water hydrants and meters. Some people worked during the day, others on nights and weekends. At times, as many as 14 people were working on the project simultaneously.
Kids handed tools to workers, carried cool drinks and snacks to the work sites, and distributed informational flyers door-to-door. The oldest worker, Howard Field, 80, was on the job every day for five months.
“I put pipe together and greased joints,” says Field, who also retrieved out-of-town supplies.
The mayor even got down in the trenches. “I tamped sand in around pipe as we went along,” Stafford says.
Project coordinators came up with creative ways to use volunteer labor. Some people took over Haskins’ normal duties—reading water meters, mowing grass, and trimming trees—to give him time to work on the lines. Farmers lent tractors, loaders, and fencing. Joe Peters, a custom harvester, donated a hog to provide meals to the volunteer workers.
Vera Dempsey had, perhaps, the most important job of all—finding volunteer cooks and coordinating preparation of a noon meal six days a week for six months. Besides the hog, chickens, canned goods, turkeys, hams, paper plates, and utensils were donated.
“No menus were planned,” Dempsey says. “Once we had potato salad six days in a row, but each one was different.”
No one complained. “It sure kept us going,” the mayor says.
By the project’s end last September, volunteers had spent 7,000 hours laying water lines, 1,000 hours preparing food, and 900 hours in planning meetings. “Everybody sacrificed a lot, but we plugged away and got it done,” Stafford says.
“The community was behind it from the beginning and had the drive to see the project through,” Spiegel says. “It just goes to show, you can do it if you have the determination.”
“The water tastes better now and the pressure is good but, best of all, we don’t have to fix leaks all the time,” Field adds.
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