It’s our job as journalists to hold our local governments accountable, and most of the time, that involves criticism and second-guessing. But there are also moments when our local governments and the community come together to accomplish important things, and those deserve recognition as well.

In case you’ve been living in a walk-in freezer for the last several days – and if you have been, we’re happy for you – it’s hot outside. It does get hot in July, sure, but this is the kind of relentless scorching heat that makes everyone sweaty, sticky and more than a little salty. It’s the absolute worst kind of weather for the pool to be out of service.

Ellenville was faced with a simple problem with no simple solution. They had a pool which, unlike the county’s one in New Paltz, holds water just fine. But they didn’t have enough water to swim in. No biggie – just run a hose to the thing and you’re all set, right?

Wrong. The village is dealing with a problem with its pumps, meaning that it couldn’t fill the pool quickly, if at all. Another simple solution would be to call the water truck people and have them fill it. But it would take 50 or more water-truckloads to do the job and at $600 a pop, that would be more money than the cash-strapped village could afford.

If the kids were going to have a pool to swim in when camp started this week, some other way would have to be found.

So everybody put on their thinking caps and tried to come up with the right answer when everybody else was partying for the Fourth of July. One idea involved getting the water from the Sandberg Creek, running it through a very fine 5-micron filter and then chlorinating it. But the county health department, whose job it is to make sure the pool is safe for use, wouldn’t approve.

Another idea was to use fire engines to carry the water from the Town of Wawarsing wells to the pools. But the county had an objection to that too – a lot of fire equipment uses PFAS, a family of chemicals now held to be a serious health hazard, so serious that it was a risk the county was not willing to take.

The Wawarsing Town Board then went into action mode. Councilman and Ellenville FD President Mike Moschetta set to organizing the firematic caravan, while Town Supervisor Terry Houck set to convincing the county that the trucks and equipment involved never even came in contact with PFAS. Its fears calmed, the health department okayed the plan.

What followed was something extraordinary – at 7:30 in the morning on Saturday, July 6, firetruck after firetruck made the trip from the wells to the pool, filling it bit by bit. By the time the job was done, 100,000 gallons of water in all had gone in, and the pool was good to go. While the heat continues to be brutal, at least there is now an option to cool down and get some exercise to boot.

We at the Shawangunk Journal were impressed by this. We’re not at a point in history where government at any level seems to have it together, nor are we in one of those eras where everyone is on anything like the same page. A cynic would predict that in a situation like this, everyone who could help wouldn’t, and would just throw in the towel.

But the towel would be needed for more than that, like for someone to dry off with after they got out of the pool. Concerned people came together, worked on creative solutions, sacrificed some of their holiday weekend and got the job done.

The weather? We can’t do much about that except draw ever closer to the almighty air conditioner. (Maybe walk-in freezer owners should start listing them on Airbnb…) The generalized disintegration of civic cohesion both here and abroad? We can’t do much about that either. But here in our hometowns, we can buck the trend and choose to work together for the benefit of the community.

So, we thank everyone who helped get the pool filled. It’s just a drop in the bucket, so to speak, but it means a lot to the people of Ellenville and Wawarsing. And it’s something we can be proud of for years to come.