Community steps up to provide water

Utility general manager Scott Johnstone, on the phone Saturday, apologized for the mixed signals that customers were getting, and said the utility was also getting mixed signals from the state, depending which state agency was doing the talking. He said the utility must tell the public what the state tells it.

“There were some items that were crystal clear, and everyone agreed on,” like drinking the water or using it in ice cubes or food preparation, he said. “Then there were things like washing your hands, where DEC was saying, ‘Yeah, you can do that,’ and the Department of Health was saying, ‘No, you shouldn’t touch the water,’ almost in language to the point that some people were reading and hearing that as ‘No, it might kill you.’”

Last week, though, it took a whole lot of help to provide drinking water for Morrisville residents, and local businesses and faith leaders rose to the challenge, providing thousands of gallons of drinking water.

Giving tanks

Perhaps the hardest hit was Copley Hospital, which uses so much water on a daily basis — keeping equipment sterile, hands clean, laundry washed and people hydrated — that is simply wasn’t feasible to boil water.

“There aren’t enough pots and pans in the world,” Joe Woodin, the hospital’s CEO and president, said Tuesday.

The hospital only had to cancel elective surgeries for one day, Monday, before the actual flooding occurred. After that, it was Manosh, by gosh.

The ubiquitous water well-drilling business was able to chip in by sending several tanker trucks to Stowe, which wasn’t hit nearly as hard by the flooding, and pull from its drinking water supply and hook up to the hospital.

Woodin said initially the hospital estimated it would need about 16,000 gallons a day, but it ended up using 23,000 each day — that’s the daily water usage of 77 American homes, Woodin said.

Mark Sutton, the hospital’s director of facilities, security and safety, said last year, the hospital added a new valve and pumps system to the building. It was a just-in-case infrastructure improvement that no one really thought would ever be needed.

Last week, it was. It was the only way to practically transfer thousands of gallons of water a day without having an on-site water storage system that can hold it all.

“If this had happened a year ago, the hospital would have shut down for a week, or 10 days, or however long it’s going to be now,” Sutton said Tuesday.

Woodin praised the efforts of the Manosh workers who dropped what they were doing to come through for the hospital.

“It’s been a lot, not just for the hospital, but for all of us,” Woodin said “But you know what, we’re not giving up.”

With Manosh tied up supplying water for the hospital, Morrisville Water & Light had to search elsewhere for a tanker truck to set up a filling station at its headquarters on Route 12.

The water station didn’t get fully set up until late Wednesday night, but by Thursday, there was a steady stream of cars coming and leaving with gallons of potable water.

Johnstone credits police chief Jason Luneau — who is serving as interim town manager this summer — for finding an 8,000-gallon tanker from Milton on the fly.

“He was a flipping rock star through all of this,” Johnstone said.

Got to have faith

While Copley was flush in water and the utility was scrambling to find water through its proper governmental channels, the village needed to drink, and Rev. Becca Girrell spurred an army of faithful to put the community into her United Community Church of Morrisville, which sees a lot of people with no jobs or homes at its free weekly breakfasts.

“Many are without transportation and discretionary income, so these are folks that are not going to be able to buy themselves bottled water,” Girrell said.

So, she put the word out through the faith community network, and the word spread. As the word got louder that Morrisville needed water, people — mostly in Stowe, where the water was just fine — began filling up whatever vessels they could find on Tuesday and brought them to the church. Thus began what Girrell deemed a “water library,” fitting for a church located right next door to the Morristown Centennial Library. A motley array of hand-filled jugs took space on a table next to a few bottles of Tito vodka with “Water (Really)” written on them in Sharpie.

Later Wednesday afternoon, Patti Rubin, head of the Greater Stowe Interfaith Coalition, was able to organize much larger shipments.

The first big donation came from the Alchemist Brewery in Stowe, which filled hundreds of cases of cans — 2,400 of them, gleaming silver minus the famous Heady Topper labels — with fresh water and sealed them and boxed them up on Wednesday evening.

“It has a slight floral taste to it,” Girrell noted.

The next day, Thursday morning, Cold Hollow Cider Mill in Waterbury Center sent one of its delivery trucks filled with cases of its one-gallon cider jugs filled with water and sealed.

When the Congregational Church, United Church of Christ in Charlotte, 50 miles away, got word of the need, volunteers didn’t hesitate to lend a helping hand.

The senior pastor of the church, Rev. Kevin Goldenbogen, explained that the church has a disaster coordinator who is responsible for connecting those who have a need to those who can help out and the first urgent need that he was aware of was the water situation in Morrisville.

“At 3 p.m., I just put out a note to everyone in our congregation and let everyone know that at noon on Thursday, we were going to send some carloads of water — as much as we can collect,” Goldenbogen said. “By the next morning, at 9 a.m., we had 1,600 pounds of water, 200 gallons.”

All told, Girrell said last Thursday that people donated 1,200 gallons of water to the church, which distributed about 900 gallons in 36 hours.

A few minutes after she mentioned how some people cannot buy bottled water, Girrell reflected on that.

“Those two words, ‘afford’ and ‘water’ do not belong in the same sentence,” she said. “I think potable water is necessary for life. It is a right, not a commodity.”

Liberty Darr contributed to this report.