By Clay LePard
clepard@cbs4qc.com
The nightmare for one small Illinois town could be coming to an end. It's been nearly a week since most residents of Lynn Center had running water.
Crews will start working Friday to replace the broken water line that sits underneath railroad tracks.
A battle over liability insurance with the railroad company has held up repairs on the 200 ft. pipe.
"We're not a city, not a town, not a village, just a community," says Stuart Etheridge, President of the Lynn Center Water Association. "That's where the rub comes in with basic insurance. I've talked to insurance companies, if we were anything but a community, we could have that insurance."
The railroad company has granted an emergency dig for today. During this entire battle, about 100 people in this small town must travel across town to grab water from a local well and bring it back home.
Residents say even the simplest tasks like doing laundry or flushing the toilet have become a burden.
"Before I didn't think about it," says Carolyn Lowery. "But now I know how hard and how much I appreciate the water when we don't have it and how lucky we are to have water just to do the littlest things like wash out hands. We don't even have that."
They say they can't wait for everything to go back to normal. Workers hope to have water running throughout town by Saturday.
Moving forward, water leaders say the new configuration of the pipe setup will prevent something like this from happening again.
"Hopefully get by another 50 years but who knows," Etheridge adds. "This does simplify things in the future if the line would break."
