THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT 
              Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: Sunday, September 24, 1995             TAG: 9509240040
SECTION: LOCAL                    PAGE: B4   EDITION: FINAL 
SOURCE: BY ELIZABETH THIEL, STAFF WRITER 
DATELINE: CHESAPEAKE                         LENGTH: Short :   49 lines

CITY SEES BEAUTY IN GROUPS ADOPTING PUMP STATIONS THE SHEDS WHERE SEWAGE IS PUMPED COULD USE HELP.

Everybody's heard of adopting highways, adopting schools or adopting grandparents.

But adopting a pump station?

A new Chesapeake program is aimed at finding friends for those long-ignored icons of suburban life, the unglamorous workhorses that pump sewage from neighborhoods to central waste treatment plants.

Marvin W. Lewis, the city's wastewater pump station superintendent, said he knows of no other program like it in Hampton Roads.

``It's something that with a little effort on both the city and the citizens' sides, we can make the city a better place to live,'' Lewis said.

The pump stations, small brick sheds or metal boxes on top of concrete slabs, generally are unsightly. City workers plant hedges and grass around them. But there are only two workers to maintain about 220 of the structures citywide. Hedges sometimes go unclipped, grass uncut.

Lynn A. Ischep, 36, president of the Seabrooke Landing Civic League, was getting tired of looking at the pump station in her neighborhood last spring. She approached city officials with the idea of allowing her group to give it a face lift.

Lewis got together with some other officials and turned the idea into the adopt-a-pump-station program.

Ischep's group so far is the only one to have taken on the project.

The Seabrooke Landing pump station, a metal box sitting on a corner next to a vacant lot, used to be painted a bright blue and surrounded by a few scraggly hedges.

Ishep's group has weeded the hedge beds, planted flowers and a white crape myrtle tree and bordered the area with a neat wooden fence. Ischep painted the metal box a deep green, which blends with the greenery around it. Two neighboring homeowners allow the group to use their well water for sprinklers.

Homeowners from throughout the neighborhood took turns all summer watering the plants.

``Our civic league was pretty much a dead-beat civic league, just getting together when we had a crisis,'' Ischep said.

``It gave us a project,'' she said. ``Pretty much everybody's gotten in on the act.'' by CNB