A Drop of Kindness : Scouts Offer Their Lake’s Water to Townsfolk

The 35,000 Boy Scouts of San Francisco, Oakland and Alameda counties are doing a good deed for this small Northern California town.

Because of the drought, Willits, population 4,500, figures to run out of drinking water by summer’s end, barring lots of summer storms.

The Scouts said they won’t let that happen.

On a bluff to the west overlooking the town is the 2,200-acre Carl F. Wente Boy Scout Camp, a forest enclave embracing a picturesque, man-made lake 2 1/2 miles in circumference.

Forty feet at its greatest depth, the lake contains more than 900 million gallons of sparkling, crystal-clear water.

Willits City Manager Bill Van Orden wrote the Scouts offering to purchase water from the lake starting the first week in September if the drought continues.

800,000 Gallons a Day

“We’re planning for the worst, but hoping for the best,” Van Orden wrote. “If it doesn’t rain we would need as much as 800,000 gallons a day from the lake to take care of the town’s water requirements.”

The Board of Directors of the San Francisco Boy Scout Council voted to permit the town of Willits to pump what water it needed at no charge.

“We felt it was the least we could do. The town has done us many favors, been an excellent neighbor the 25 years we have had the lake and camp,” said Dave Dunakin, director of camping for the Scouts’ San Francisco Bay Council.

Mike Strain, director of the Carl Wente Boy Scout Camp, added: “This is what the Boy Scouts are all about. By offering the town water from our lake we’re exemplifying the Boy Scout creed of doing a good turn.”

Generosity a Surprise

Van Orden said the Scouts’ generosity took civic leaders by surprise. “In this day and age when everybody is out for the almighty dollar, the Boy Scouts cannot be commended enough for their action,” the city manager said.

Willits’ prime source of water is Morris Reservoir, fed by runoff from the local mountains. But the reservoir has been drawn down by two straight years of below-average precipitation, plus high consumption during last summer’s record fire season.

“If the Boy Scouts hadn’t come through, the plan was to pump water from a well in the town park,” explained Alan Birket, chief water plant operator for Willits. “But the problem is the water from the well is marginal for human consumption. It has a bad odor and bad taste. The water at the Boy Scout lake is of top quality.”

Well Water Restricted

The town’s health department said the park well water could be used only in extreme emergency.

Last week, selected state prison inmates--short-timers soon to be released after serving time for lesser offenses--completed laying 2 miles of 8-inch pipe to carry the water from the Boy Scout lake to the town’s water treatment plant before being fed into the municipal system.

Boys 11 to 15 years old from 250 Bay Area Scout troops use Camp Wente. The Scouts bought the property in 1963 from a timber company, built a dam and created the lake. Normally, there’s so much rain in the area--city officials insist that it totals 50 inches in an average year--that the lake overflows the spillway. That’s not the case this year, but because the Scouts don’t draw from the lake, it is near the top.

“If Willits runs out of water and pumps, say, 28 million gallons of water from the lake, in six weeks, that would take a foot off the top of the lake. That’s about a year’s supply of normal rainfall and runoff,” Strain said.

“We could cope with that with no problem. If the rains still don’t come, we will continue pumping water out of the lake into the homes of the people in Willits. We’re glad to be of help.”