Scottsbluff built a playground in a week in 2009. Now the wood is splitting

Saturday morning at the Kiwanis Trails of Fun playground in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, looked more like a construction site than a place to play. Paint was splattered, power tools were buzzing, and 40 to 50 volunteers worked into the afternoon on the rail that rings the play area. 1

They replaced the top rail with composite lumber, added metal framing to the playground's wooden spires, and touched up paint on the boards. 1 The playground is 17 years old, and this is the biggest renovation since the week it went up. 2

Here is the number I keep returning to: the full renovation could take four to six years, or longer, before every section is finished. 1 A town that built the whole thing in a single week is looking at half-decades of repair.

Seventeen Panhandle summers and winters have been hard on the original timber. Raul Aguallo, a Kiwanis lieutenant governor for Division 7, described the problem. "It's dry. There's a lot of heat, a lot of cold," he said. "It's always a constant struggle to keep any kind of wood in this part of the country." 1

Some pieces are splitting and will be swapped for metal or composite. 2 Bob Comings, who chaired the original construction, described it bluntly: "Some of the wood is giving up on us." 2

The replacement carries its own trade-offs. Brad Conklin, who owns Complete Construction and volunteered his time and tools on Saturday, said composite outlasts wood, though older boards warp in long, unsupported runs once the heat gets to them. The vinyl-wrapped composite going onto this year's top rail should hold up better. 1

For Conklin, Saturday carried more than a construction job. His father worked on the original 2009 build while employed at a local auto parts store, and now lives with frontotemporal dementia, which affects memory, personality and behaviour. 1

Conklin saw the renovation posted on Facebook, and the timing caught him: his oldest daughter turns 19 soon, and he has spent countless hours there with his three girls. "I am so busy that I really can't afford to take the time to do this, but I have to," he said. "Knowing that my dad did this, and now I can tell my kids, 'Hey, I did this.' Maybe one day my grandkids." 1

Keyton Shannon and Vinicente Dominguez, both 15 and both in the Scottsbluff High School Key Club, grew up on the equipment they spent the morning repairing. The playground went up before either was born. 1

"I just want to help the new kids have fun, just as much fun as we had," Shannon said. Dominguez noticed the older volunteers working beside the teenagers. "Being out here and seeing older people helping out warms my heart to see that they care," he said. 1

The playground began with a comparison. Bob Comings was Kiwanis club president when his wife, Maureen, pointed out that Casper and Lander, Wyoming, both had large community-built playgrounds. "She said, 'Why don't we build like the one in Casper?'" 1

Comings found Leathers and Associates, a New York firm that designs playgrounds built by volunteer labour and has worked on more than 3,400 of them. He brought the idea to the club as a "big, hairy, audacious goal." 1 The firm estimated the roughly $150,000 would take more than a year to raise. Scottsbluff did it in six months. 12

Volunteers broke ground in February 2009 and built the entire playground in a single week that August. About 600 people rotated through, including some unlikely pairings: local jail detention trustees worked alongside police officers, and rival high school athletes from Scottsbluff and Gering raised walls and painted boards side by side. 1

Maureen Comings organised childcare during the build so parents could still put in volunteer hours, and every day ended with a donated lunch, tracked on a plaque that still stands near the entrance. "We wanted an adventure center for them, free of charge, for the kids to come out and play, families to reconnect," she said. 1

Gretchen Foster, a Kiwanis member since 2011, learned what that was worth years later at a gas station, when a stranger recognised her Kiwanis T-shirt and stopped to say thank you. She told Foster she brought her grandchildren out there all the time. "She said, 'I can't afford to do much with them, but I can come out there, and they can have hours of fun, and it doesn't cost me a thing.'" 1

Raul Aguallo expects that virtually every piece of the playground will be replaced eventually. "I would think that everything will probably get replaced at some time, but it'll take a lifetime to do it," he said. 1

Bob Comings watched volunteers work on a section of railing he helped install two decades ago, and seemed unbothered by the job ahead. "I love this," he said, pointing to freshly painted sections that already looked sharper than the surrounding structure. "It's getting there." 1

The club is planning a fundraiser that will let community members buy engraved picket fence boards, the way it did before the pandemic, and is still working out the price. 1 The playground sits in Riverside Park, behind the Riverside Discovery Center in Scottsbluff. For the first workday the club asked for 50 to 100 volunteers, sorted by skill level and comfort with tools, with experienced workers directing the jobs. 2