Tanika Willis remembers when she could walk to an office in her neighborhood to pick up vouchers for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children. The location, at the Focus on Renewal Community Center in McKees Rocks, made her quarterly trips to pick up her vouchers really convenient.

That was before Hurricane Ivan struck in 2004, flooding the WIC office.

Now, she has to go to Downtown Pittsburgh to receive the food voucher. Although the office in the basement of the renewal center reopened earlier this month, it only is staffed one day a week and then only for new clients.

Those clients then have to go either Downtown or to Carnegie for quarterly appointments.

"It seems crazy to me," said Joni Rabinowitz, who runs Just Harvest, an anti-hunger advocacy organization. Just Harvest organized a bus of WIC recipients to go to County Council's meeting last week to ask for the office to be opened full time, but the council meeting ran late and the children that had come with them had to get home to bed.

Joyce Dodge, the WIC program manager for the Allegheny County Health Department, said there had been two other minor floods, in the late 1990s and in 2001, but the most recent one was the first to leave the office unusable.

Focus on Renewal received a $125,000 grant from the county Department of Economic Development to repair the damage and renovate the office for the program, but Ms. Dodge said she doesn't want to send workers there.

"We still don't like the space," she said. "It's moldy, dark and dank."

Ms. Dodge wanted the office to be located upstairs in the building, but Focus on Renewal did not make a space available. The county provides the staffing for the office, but will not pay rent for it.

Two people from WIC's Carnegie office staff it one day a week, but it only operates to handle new clients.

Ms. Dodge said in the time it has been opened, two people have enrolled in WIC. She said that wasn't the best use of the limited manpower.

DeShauna Ponton, the child nutrition advocate for Just Harvest and a former WIC recipient, said the county is dooming the office to fail by limiting the hours, restricting it to new clients, and not advertising that it is even there.

When it was open five days a week, the office used to service more than 1,000 clients a month.

Ms. Dodge said the clients only have to visit a WIC office four times a year to be part of the program.

Mrs. Willis, a school bus driver who is married to a UPS package handler, said that going Downtown, where there is limited parking, is much tougher than it was to visit the office in her neighborhood. On two of those visits, she said, she has to take her 3-year-old to prove that she is still eligible for the program. Before the 2004 flood, she had two children in the program, one was an infant, the other in preschool.

The WIC program is a supplemental food program that provides such essentials as milk, eggs, cereal, cheese and peanut butter. Mrs. Willis said it saves her household about $50 a month in groceries.

The program, paid for by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is solely for pregnant women and children under 5. Mrs. Willis's older daughter is now too old for the family to receive the supplemental food for her.

Dave Zazac, the spokesman for the Health Department, said there are no plans to increase the hours for the McKees Rocks WIC office or to close it. Instead, the county is watching how much the reopened office is used.

"We are evaluating the situation," Mr. Zazac said. "It's a wait-and-see situation."