COLUMBIA, S.C. (WIS) – The Vital Records Office at the South Carolina Department of Public Health said the volume of customers in the office since DHEC was dissolved has put a strain on their air conditioning units.

Temperatures inside the office on Monday were as warm as 82 degrees. Staff said the minimum wait time to be seen was an hour on Tuesday.

“It’s just like a mad house in there. You know? It’s hot. You can’t find a place to sit,” said a woman, who asked to remain anonymous.

“It got so hot. I’m an asthmatic. I’m a 100% disabled veteran through the V.A.,” she continued.

“So I went, and asked the clerk about why it was so hot. She told me for two years she’s been trying to get the heating fixed.”

On July 1, South Carolina DHEC split into the Department of Public Health and the Department of Environmental Services.

DPH said the high volume of customers in the building at once is what put a strain on their air conditioning unit’s ability to cool the office fast enough.

“We are experiencing a surge in the volume of in-person requests for vital records at 2600 Bull Street, which is also affecting our air conditioner’s ability to adequately cool the area. We are working to improve the air conditioning output now to help keep our customers and staff cool,” the department said in a statement.

The woman we spoke with initially said security told her she couldn’t leave the office to cool off.

“The lobby was the only place that had cool air. He told me I either had to go back inside where I was in the vital records office, or go outside. And I refused to go outside because it was even hotter outside. Because I can’t be in high humidity with the problem with my asthma related to my disability,” she said.

“The solution was to tell me to go to my car and she took our number for the window. And she took our phone numbers and she said we will call you. Go sit out in your [car] with your air running if you have small children. Or if you don’t feel like you can sit in here. It’s too hot,” she added.

On Tuesday, a floor A/C unit was installed beside the reception desk temporarily fixing the issue.

A Tuesday evening response from DPH Media Relations responded to questions surrounding the possibility of understaffing within the agency and plans to fix the A/C said, “We routinely need more staff in Vital Records, so this is not a new issue or concern for us. When this occurs, we pull staff from the back to help customers upfront. In addition, we have expedited the job postings for this area.

“Regarding the air conditioning, it simply was not functioning well enough to keep everyone cool. While assessments and repairs are performed on the air conditioning system, two portable cooling units have been set up in the customer service areas, improving the temperature already, with more improvement expected tomorrow with additional temporary efforts.”

“In addition to cooler temperatures, we can also report the good news that our current wait times for in-person service have currently returned to their normal range although fluctuations can be expected as volume remains high.”

DPH encourages customers to bring exact payment (i.e., cash, check, money order) and completed forms to reduce in-person volume.

In addition, DPH says it takes longer to process amendments to vital records than to simply issue a record.

If a person does not have an immediate need for a vital record, other options are available including online, by phone at 1-877-284-1008, by mail, or by drop-off. You can learn more about these options online.

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The dam at Lake Conestee, just south of Greenville, is getting replaced.

Four years ago, a sentence like that was nigh impossible.

It turns out that collective action (a.k.a. community-engaged democracy) is what got things going after years of inaction, frustration, finger pointing, and hand wringing over what to do about an antique dam holding back a passel of toxic metals flushed into the Reedy River over decades of Greenville’s Industrial Age growth.

And what got the collective action going were press stories (like this one that South Carolina Public Radio did four years ago) that served to inspire citizens like Ralph Cushing to bring attention to the possibility of an ecological catastrophe, and to spur state lawmakers from the Greenwood/Laurens region to get state funding behind a plan to head off such possibilities.

Cushing is a Greenwood resident who describes himself as a “type-triple-A personality” because he finds it too difficult to sit still. The problem was, he kind of had to because he was recovering from knee surgery and was relegated to haunting the internet. That’s where he came across news stories explaining what is at stake upriver in Greenville County.

To recap briefly: Lake Conestee Dam was built with a 50-year lifespan in mind in the 1890s, but is still standing. It is a genuine marvel of engineering, but its construction is a mystery today, as there are no known records of how it was built.

Without knowing the true nature of the dam’s construction, no one is really sure whether the structure could last another century or crumple under a stiff breeze – or an earthquake – by tomorrow morning.

Yet, for all the danger pressing up against that wall, Cushing had never heard of Lake Conestee Dam before his surgery. Neither had state Rep. John McCravy, R-Greenwood, nor state Sen. Billy Garrett, R-Greenwood, despite that the water that flows downriver from Conestee ends up in Lake Greenwood – the freshwater supply for much of Greenwood and Laurens counties – and that a release of enough toxic sludge to fill a football stadium upstream could effectively kill a set of communities two counties to the south.

Cushing and McCravy learned about the dam and its potential dangers around the same time, about a year-and-a-half ago. Cushing put together a Facebook group, Save Lake Greenwood, where he laid out what was at stake and urged a letter-writing campaign to lawmakers to raise their awareness.

And it worked. Dozens of letters a week, Cushing says, landed in the email inboxes and on the desks of McCravy, Garret, and state Rep. Stewart Jones, R-Laurens, asking them to find a solution. Jones told Cushing that the volume of letters was “significant.”

To either fix the dam or build a new one a few yards downriver from the existing one would cost anywhere between $40 million and $60 million, by most estimates; and multiple entities had long argued over which of them is the most responsible and who should flip the tab for a largescale project.

A major hang-up in figuring out who would pay how much was that there was no plan to do anything specific. Did the dam need to be shored up? Reinforced? Replaced? No one knew –partly because no one had done any work to figure out what was the best solution.

Garrett and McCravy figured it was best to get state funding behind what they saw as a genuine emergency first, “and worry about the rest later,” McCravy says.

Garrett lobbied hard for $3 million to find out the best way to deal with Lake Conestee Dam. That exploratory project did not use all the money before it concluded that the existing dam needs to be left in place and a new, 100-year storm-and earthquake-resistant structure needs to be built a few yards downstream.

Once that was identified, McCravy says, state lawmakers made a line item in the state budget last year, which ultimately came to more than $40 million. Further private donations to the Lake Conestee Dam Restoration Project means the project has about $47 million to build a new retention wall dam that would catch and hold any spill from a break, according to Kelly Lowry, the president of the Lake Conestee Dam Restoration Project.

Lowry picked up a decades-long fight to get the situation at Lake Conestee looked at. He also spearheaded numerous public meetings that drew hundreds of concerned residents to venues at which he outlined the dangers of a dam break and the need to keep the pressure on state lawmakers to fund a replacement wall.

For Lowry, news that state money has gone towards the situation is akin to at least a few sips of warm milk.

“I wake up at two in the morning thinking about this,” Lowry says, referring to the potential for a dam break. He’s feeling much more at ease now that seismic test engineers are running ground tests and laying out where the new dam will go.

He’s aware that until the new dam is built, anything could still happen. But the fact that Lake Conestee Dam is now being dealt with officially makes this a gratifying time for longtime advocates. While many in the communities that would be affected by a break only found out about the looming dangers upstream a couple years ago, advocates like Dave Hargett and other leaders of the restoration project initiative have been sounding the alarm for decades.

And what got it addressed, finally, was information, a little moxie from citizens and state officials … and mail.