Plumbing project needs help

By Michael Paul Williams

Published: December 30, 2008

Leon Brooks is a Santa Claus who lost his helpers just as he was about to complete his appointed rounds.

As described Friday by Times-Dispatch reporter Holly Prestidge, Brooks and his wife, Barbara, moved to King William County with plans to build a home. But they put their plans on hold when he learned of dwellings in his Mount Olive community without central heat, indoor toilets and plumbing.

"I was just knocked off my horse, man," he recalled yesterday. "Having moved in a community to live here, and as president of the [county] NAACP at that time, you must put the people before yourself."

In 2003, King William won a $1.4 million contract from the Virginia Department of Housing and Community Development to rehab the homes. An additional $1 million was secured from the Southeast Rural Community Assistance Project to rehab the indoor plumbing on the condition that Brooks would head a volunteer effort to install it.

He did, with the aid of a crew of five senior men. But three of them -- brothers Miles and Joe Roane and Earl Jackson -- died last year. The two other men became too ill to help. That left Brooks to finish about a mile of sewer lines and a half-mile of water lines for 26 new homes.

The 2000 census shows 19,550 occupied-dwelling units in Virginia without complete indoor plumbing. The state has addressed about 150 to 200 units per year since that time, said Gordon Hickey, spokesman for Gov. Timothy M. Kaine.

The more-recent American Community Survey puts the figure at 13,000.

Both figures represent less than 1 percent of Virginia's occupied units. In 1940, 65 percent of the state's occupied units lacked indoor plumbing. In 1970, that figure was 13 percent, according to a 1999 study by the Virginia Center for Housing Research.

The study's author, C. Theodore Koebel, said dwellings without any indoor plumbing are "fairly rare. It's becoming increasingly hard even finding them in rural areas."

Koebel, a professor of urban affairs and planning at Virginia Tech, said the problem crops up occasionally in small, historically black communities. That describes Mount Olive.

Brooks has been gratified by the response to his plight. He had received three phone calls and one letter in his mailbox offering to help. "You do not need experts, just people who are willing to work, that's all," he said. Volunteers would fit pipes together and lay them in ditches.

"If we had two teams of five, it would take us about two weeks," he said.

Brooks, a retired aircraft technician with the Virginia Air National Guard, has his own health issues stemming from injuries on the job. "I wear two leg braces, and I just take certain kinds of medicines to keep myself going," he said.

This Santa of self-help could use volunteers. It would be fitting if help arrived from home-dwellers benefiting from his generous spirit.
Contact Michael Paul Williams at (804) 649-6815 or .