While a project aimed at greatly reducing flooding in Butler's West End can't come soon enough for people who have been enduring high water over the years, it is encouraging that the $4.6 million Sullivan Run flood-control project is moving closer to construction. Preparation of a topographic map of the project area is getting under way with survey work. The mapping is scheduled to be completed about Aug. 7, if no glitches are encountered.

At this point, it is important for project area residents to understand that their cooperation in the weeks ahead will help the mapping effort to progress efficiently. Some members of the survey crew will be knocking on doors of homes along Sullivan Run and seeking entry into the homes to obtain measurements of basements and first floors.

Residents can feel comfortable in allowing entry because members of the survey crew always will be carrying photo identification cards. Residents should not allow anyone not carrying such a card to enter.

Those involved in the survey will be employees of Pedersen and Pedersen, a company from Valencia.

For Sullivan Run area residents, alleviating the flooding problem has been a frustrating wait — and that frustration was punctuated by the remnants of Hurricane Ivan in 2004.

Of course, even the Sullivan Run flood-control project won't be a fix-all for the West End. Until the inadequacies of the sanitary sewer system in that area are addressed, residents of that part of the city will continue to face potential danger to their properties.

But there are West End residents who believe that the Sullivan Run work and anything the Butler Area Sewer Authority has been planning up to now are inadequate in terms of addressing the West End's nagging issues.

"Good luck for the city to think that water will obey . . . spend the millions and, after that, the West End will still, and always be, an A5 flood zone," one resident wrote anonymously to the Butler Eagle. "You can fight Mother Nature but, as you saw in New Orleans, she will always win."

The same person, who said he or she has been urging the state Department of Environmental Protection to "fine BASA and keep fining them heavily," asked how West End residents can have faith in BASA's ability to solve a big problem "when they cannot even fix the simple ones."

BASA must strive to improve its image with West End residents in the same way that city leaders, in regard to the Sullivan Run project, must not permit any letup in regard to moving that project forward.

Sullivan Run has been a decade-long exercise in planning and revised planning. After the current mapping is completed, DEP, the state Department of Transportation and the city can move ahead with design of a new channel for the creek, at least five new bridges and the straightening of the creek bed at Miller and Penn Streets.

That means construction is not just "around the corner." Much planning work still is ahead.

Nevertheless, despite the delays up to now, there is movement forward and that is cause for cautious optimism while acknowledging the pessimism and concerns that exist.

Improved conditions in the West End cannot be realized without any attempt to achieve them.