On Father’s Day, a 24-year-old Blanco man took his girlfriend swimming at Pedernales Falls State Park, but when he dove into the water, he struck a rock, injuring his spinal cord.

That means when he gets home from the hospital later this week, he’ll be in a wheelchair, but his family couldn’t afford to have a ramp built to their mobile home.

Happily, the ramp-building team in Johnson City not only was able to build the ramp and larger front porch at the home, but also delivered the wheelchair he would need.

The wheelchair part actually was the easiest. It took only a few minutes for Sophie Johnson, administrator at the LBJ Medical Center Nursing Home in Johnson City, to find a chair she could donate to the Blanco recipient.

“The ramp itself was pretty straightforward,” said the team’s build-boss, Dave Hamm. “The existing front porch was too small, so we replaced it with a bigger one, then extended the ramp itself across the front of the home to the ground.”

Once the design was worked out, the team did the actual construction in two steps.

“We do the cutting and frame-building in Dave’s shop, where there’s plenty of room and all the tools we need,” said veteran team member Rick Hedger.

“It’s easier to do it in the shop than on-site, and this time of year, it’s a lot cooler, too.”

At the house, the job moved smoothly under the cut-no-corners eye of Tommy Levitt, himself a wheelchair user, and the team’s quality-control boss.

“It seems like a small detail, but just a couple of degrees of slope means a big difference in how easy it is for a person in a wheelchair to climb a slope. We build to tight specifications to make it easy and safe for the person in the chair to use,” Levitt said.

“It is by the Grace of God that we are able to build ramps instead of having to use them, a gift but also an obligation to use that gift of mobility to help those who no longer have it,” John Penrod explained why he volunteers for the wheelchair projects.

The team, headquartered at the First United Methodist Church in Johnson City, builds ramps at no charge for people in Blanco and other nearby counties who need them but can’t afford to have them built.

The volunteers provide the labor, and the materials are paid for by the Texas Ramp Project, a statewide non-profit which sponsors such local work.