ANGRY FIRE VICTIMS FACE WATER DISTRICT

McCLURE, Ill. -- Since the destruction of their home, Bill and Ann Spraggs live in two rooms of their own motel.

On July 15, an electrical short started a fire that burned down their mobile home near Bill's Motel. The Spraggs used the front of that home for an office and lived in the rest.

The couple blamed a lack of water for the loss of their home, located near McClure, and a car and four-wheeler parked nearby. With no water lines available, firefighters had to rely on a tanker full of water to merely keep the blaze from spreading.

The Spraggs had $8,000 worth of insurance on the contents but estimate they lost $35,000 in property in the blaze.

Most upsetting, they said, is that they were promised water from the McClure-East Cape Public Water District when they bought the property nearly two years ago. They claim that in the fall of 1994, the former owner said water lines from the treatment plant in McClure would be extended within two months.

It didn't happen. On Thursday, the Spraggs attended a water district board meeting to confront board members. The board members said the former owner's promise shouldn't have been made.

That didn't mollify the Spraggs.

"It is easy for you guys to sit here and tell me this (expletive deleted) because you haven't lost anything," Ann Spraggs said. "All we get is the runaround."

At the heart of the misunderstanding is a grant awarded in 1994 to extend the water lines. Bill Colyer, chairman of the water district, said a separate amount was awarded to move water lines after work to raise Route 146 disturbed them.

Some residents are getting the two grants confused, Colyer said, and don't understand why work was done on the East Cape Girardeau water lines before the McClure lines.

Still, it has been nearly two years since the district discovered they received a grant to extend water lines from McClure to the Spraggs and several other families. Colyer said floods in 1995 and this year, along with problems getting necessary easements, caused the delays.

To extend the water lines through landowners' property, the district must get easements from those landowners. About four more easements are left.

Those four are going to be particularly difficult to obtain. In one case, the property owner is in a nursing home and his trustee hasn't been found. Another piece of property has multiple owners located all over the country.

Because of this, the district declined to give the Spraggs a specific date for water line work. Board members also stressed that their primary purpose was to provide drinking water, not water to fight fires. The small McClure water plant already is taxed almost to the limit.

The Spraggs left the meeting clearly upset, but they aren't the only victims of fire who live near the water district. Mary Benefield, who also attended Thursday's meeting, was promised district water in the fall of 1994 as her neighbors were.

She was anxious to get it. In the 1970s, a fire destroyed her father's restaurant. In 1986, another fire claimed her home, and in 1993, her son's mobile home burned to the ground. Benefield doesn't blame the fire department for any of the incidents.

"They did the best they could, but there's no water," she said.