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Faced with shortages, residents helping out by making face masks, hand sanitizer

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Melanie Beth Scott of Avella makes masks for health care workers.

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Melanie Beth Scott of Avella holds up a mask she made for health care workers.

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Melanie Beth Scott holds up masks she made for health care workers.

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Some face masks made by residents through Operation Face Mask, Washington County.

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Some face masks made by residents through Operation Face Mask, Washington County.

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Some face masks made by residents through Operation Face Mask, Washington County.

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File photo from March of face masks made by residents through Operation Face Mask, Washington County

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Some face masks made by residents through Operation Face Mask, Washington County.

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Some face masks made by residents through Operation Face Mask, Washington County.

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Some face masks made by residents through Operation Face Mask, Washington County.

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Some face masks made by residents through Operation Face Mask, Washington County.

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Some face masks made by residents through Operation Face Mask, Washington County.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated. 

Toilet paper has been in short supply. So have cleaning supplies and hand sanitizer.

But the coronavirus siege has also led to elastic disappearing off the shelf.

Why? People here and in other parts of the country who are handy with a needle and thread have been grabbing supplies to make face masks for first responders and vulnerable residents as the stock of medical face masks dwindles at hospitals, doctor’s offices, nursing homes and other locations. The shortages have occurred as a result of supply chains from China that have been upended and panic buying on these shores.

The face masks that people are making are by no means perfect – the masks used by personnel in hospitals and other medical facilities are constructed out of special paper that is breathable and durable, and can keep out most airborne particles. The homemade versions that deploy cotton are not as reliable, but better than doing without entirely.

Lina Vetter, a Jefferson Hills resident and French teacher at Pleasant Hills Middle School, starting cranking out homemade face masks last Thursday, using materials she had available for a handbag business she operates on the side. In five days, she managed to fit together about 250.

“I’m putting them together assembly-line style, but the problem is I’m the only one on the assembly line,” Vetter said. She went online and found a pattern for a face mask, and put out the world on social media that they would be available for people who need them. Vetter has been leaving them out on her front porch and people have been stopping by to pick them up. She’s been getting around the elastic shortage by using ribbon.

“You might look like a ninja,” Vetter pointed out. “But at least you’re a protected ninja.”

The dearth of elastic online or on store shelves has also bedeviled Ben McMillen, a Waynesburg resident who has launched Masks for Greene County. The lack of elastic is the only stumbling block in his efforts to transform a basement space where he and his family manufacture specialized backpacking equipment into a mask-making mecca.

“We’re built to handle as many as we need,” McMillen said.

Also a photographer, McMillen said both his family enterprises have become dormant due to the coronavirus, so making the masks was a way to overcome a feeling of helplessness.

“It gives us control,” McMillen explained. He hopes the masks will be distributed first to Greene County residents, and those aged 60 or older. As he talked about his efforts Monday afternoon, he said phone calls were coming in from people who needed them or wanted to help craft them. His goal is to get 2,000 made by the end of this week.

Similarly struck by the need to help, Melanie Beth Scott, a veteran quilter who lives in Avella, launched Operation Face Mask, Washington County, late last week.

“I noticed there was a need, just in the national news,” she said. “And I hadn’t seen anything in our area.”

Scott is hoping that she and other members of the group sew together at least 200 masks by the end of the week, but “it’s just a matter of getting them out to the people who need them. It’s a collaborative effort.”

Operation Face Mask, Washington County, can be reached by email at OperationFaceMaskWashCoPA@gmail.com.

On Monday, state Rep. Bud Cook, a Republican who represents the 49th Legislative District, announced what he called the “49th Cottage Industry Attack Plan,” which includes a call for constituents to make face masks.

“This effort is fashioned much like the individual efforts made during World War II,” Cook said in a statement.

While she said the homemade face masks were a demonstration of the “compassionate spirit” of the commonwealth’s residents, Rachel Levine, Pennsylvania’s health secretary, explained that they “are not the masks that will be necessary” and her department was looking to find ways to get more masks available.

Along with face masks, hand sanitizer is tough to find, and Liberty Pole Spirits has gotten into the spirit of actively battling COVID-19.

The Washington distillery will produce 120 gallons of hand sanitizer for Washington Health System – all in gallon containers.

“We’re trying to do what we can,” said Ellen Hough, co-owner of the East Maiden Street facility with her husband, Jim, and their two sons. “We got the call, ‘Can you help us?’ We should absolutely bend over backwards to do that.”

She said Brook Ward, president and chief executive officer of the health system, made the request by email last week.

The project, however, will be on hold for a few days. The Houghs – whose sons, Kevin and Rob, handle much of the production – are awaiting shipment of two elements vital to making sanitizer: glycerin and hydrogen peroxide. They will be mixed with 80-proof ethanol, the recipe approved by the World Health Organization.

Ellen expects those missing items to arrive by week’s end, and to submit the sanitizer to WHS early next week.

This was not a spur-of-the-moment decision. “We were gearing up for this,” she said, explaining that members of the Pennsylvania Distillers Guild began contacting one another in early March, “as soon as we knew (the coronavirus) was coming to Pennsylvania.”

A neighborhood competitor, Red Pump Spirits on North Main Street, entered the COVID-19/sanitizer fray earlier, donating high-proof ethanol to the Washington County Department of Public Safety. 

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