Community Effort

Trucks pulled through the iron gates decorated with Christmas wreaths and down a dusty trail to the stone pavilion awaiting their arrival on Garner Park Ranch, located in Erath County northeast of Stephenville.

On an unusually temperate Dec. 8 evening, a crowd gathered inside the open-air building to commemorate the opening of Erath Firewater  Station No. 1, a grassroots community project headed up by ranch owner Fred Underwood Jr. to provide volunteer firefighters access to a nearby local water source as they battle blazes in the area.

The project reinstated a water well on Underwood’s property and created a place out in the rural ranchland where tanker trucks could refill without having to travel long distances. The event not only celebrated the well’s opening, but also honored the local plumbers, politicians, oilfield workers, tradesmen, community members and United employees who donated time and talent to make the project possible.

“The Great Architect up there in the sky really placed His blessing on us here that we could do this project for the community,” Underwood said during the ceremony. “A couple years ago, we were having some tremendous fires, and water was a big issue. Some of the tanker trucks and brush trucks were having to go extensive distances—all the way to Granbury— to fill up and come back. Sometimes, they’d lose a handle on the fire. I was just sitting around, and I said, ‘Well, you know, maybe I can use an old well I have up here, locate some tanks, and we can fill up some trucks.’ That was the beginning.”

Wildfires during an extremely dry 2022 served as the impetus for Underwood’s big idea. Most notably, he remembered the Big L Wildfire in March 2022, which started about 15 miles northeast of Stephenville and burned about 10,300 acres as it headed toward the town of Lipan, according to the National Wildfire Coordinating Group’s website. Officials ordered mandatory evacuations for several areas. Ranchers scrambled to protect livestock as the fast-moving fires fed by high winds ate through brushy grasslands and destroyed property.

Underwood said he remembered a disused well on a portion of his ranch that might serve as key to a better way to fight fires. The idea especially gained traction, he said, after he and his friend, Gary Aardal with Associated Well Service, hooked up a generator to the well and found water still flowed out at about 35 gallons a minute. Another friend, David Halford of H4 Construction, donated three 20,000-gallon tanks that he had sitting on a lot to Underwood’s cause as well as did the trenching required for Iron Horse Plumbing to run the water lines. Halford also took care of the special permitting it took to ship the oversized loads to Underwood’s ranch and the lifting equipment required to lift the tanks over the fencing surrounding Underwood’s ranch. Circle J Backhoe Service & Construction built the pads for workers to set the tanks.

The next step was to bring permanent power to the well, Underwood said. That’s when he called David Stone, United’s former safety & loss control director. Stone put Underwood in touch with United Senior Vice President of System Engineering Quentin Howard, who paved the way for the design and construction of this effort to take place.

United Field Engineering Representative II Halston McMillan created the design to power the well. He said he thought Underwood’s idea was great, considering the types of fires that had ravaged the area in the recent past.  

“My brother’s a Fort Worth firefighter, so I hear him tell stories of what they go through and the importance of having the ability to fill up a truck quickly so they can save ranches and houses,” McMillan said. “This project kind of hit home, you know? I just felt the entire meaning behind it, which was great. Everybody stepped up, did their part and made it happen.”

He planned the design to bring electricity to the pumps. Once designed, United Crew Chief Cory Pollard and his team set four new poles and hung the line required.

Pollard said he didn’t know the whole story behind the project until shortly before the celebration ceremony. He did remember the 100-plus degree temperatures during the two days it took to set the four poles and hang the lines.

While the impact of the time commitment of the actual job to set the poles and hang lines wasn’t large, Pollard said he was proud of the impact the entire project will have on the rural community it will serve.

“We didn’t really know what the job was when we were doing it because it was under the ranch’s name,” he said. “So, we just assumed it was a job for the ranch. We didn’t really have the big idea. The water tanks were there, but we didn’t know what they were for or what they were going to do with them. But when we got the invitation for the celebration event, it was a nice feeling. It was nice to feel like you’re helping out. I think we were all proud of what we accomplished. Going on calls and getting people’s power on is what we do, but it was a good feeling to know that someone’s taking care of us in the community by helping the fire department to better fight wildfires.”

McMillan said he received a nice email from Underwood after the project had been energized.

“Mr. Underwood wrote that the amount of volume he was getting out of the hydrant exceeded their expectations, and he said he was very grateful to the co-op and all of us who were involved for helping to make that happen,” he said.

Underwood said he’s still amazed at how many people rallied around his idea to make it a reality.

“So many people did whatever they could to help with this project,” Underwood said. “And I have to say that my ranch manager, Gil Richardson, and my ranch foreman,  Mark Brown, were always there to watch over this  project to make sure it all happened as it needed to.”

John Sandstrom is a firefighter and training officer with the Morgan Mill Volunteer Fire Department. A long-time friend of Underwood’s, he was instrumental in designing the water delivery system to fill the brush trucks and tankers.

“This thing that Fred put in is just a godsend—it really is,” Sandstrom said. “And 2022 was kind of a bad year because of the drought. We normally do about 85 to 90 runs per year. In 2022, we did 125. I’ve only been on two of those that are of that magnitude. One was the Huckabay fire, which was 20 years ago as of New Year’s Eve, and the Big L fire in 2022.”

Fighting wildfires in rural areas often requires “brush trucks,” which are capable of traversing more challenging terrain, he said. The tradeoff with these trucks’ agility is that they hold less water than standard trucks. That means fire crews must leave active fires to refill more often. Long distances between the active fire and the filling locations can make it difficult for crews to get ahead of the fire.

“Firefighting is the most satisfying thing I’ve ever done in my life,” he said. “And firefighters have two main things that we do: One is fight fires and the other is attend automobile wrecks. We get the opportunity to help people out on what is the worst day of their life. One of these days, that water on Fred’s place is going to make a difference in somebody’s life.”  

United CEO Cameron Smallwood said he was proud of the role the co-op was able to take in helping achieve success with the community firewater project.

“United’s seventh guiding principle is concern for community, and this project really gave us an excellent opportunity to exercise that principle,” Smallwood said. “We are so proud to have been able to help Mr. Underwood achieve his goal. This was a great opportunity to give back to the communities we serve, and we were more than happy to do it.”