The 4,000 or so pairs of unused work gloves will keep until next year, at least.

But the time that went into planning this year’s Big Event at Kansas University, the thousands of volunteers at the ready and hundreds of property owners who were counting on their help won’t.

Organizers say their top suggestion for the leaders of next year’s Big Event will be to build in a big contingency plan.

Billed as a day to give back to the community in a big way, KU’s fifth annual Big Event was expected to involve more than 3,600 volunteers helping with projects at 311 homes and other sites across Lawrence on Saturday. However, a forecast of storms prompted organizers to call off the event the afternoon before.

Members of the Sigma Nu fraternity spend the morning plowing a garden at One of a Kind daycare center Saturday, March 31, 2012. The group was taking part in The Big Event, in which KU students volunteer all across Lawrence doing things such as painting, gardening and weeding.

It’s not being rescheduled.

“I guess the best word is heartbreaking,” said Liz Wilkin, KU senior and the event’s executive director.

“I wish that we could help everyone that we agreed to help,” she said. But because of its magnitude and with just a few weeks left in the semester, it would have been “almost impossible to recreate the event.”

Besides logistics, liability prevented them from coordinating volunteer groups to work at sites on other days, said Wilkin and KU senior Michael Huff, Big Event director of internal affairs.

Each homeowner signed a liability waiver and underwent a site safety check prior to the event, Huff said. Volunteers also had to sign waivers. The waivers were for a specific day.

Wilkin said the first four years of the Big Event at KU, which is funded by sponsorships and in-kind donations, enjoyed great weather and went off as planned.

Organizers for the 2016 Big Event are being selected this week, and Wilkin and Huff said one of their top suggestions for next year’s planning crew would be for them to build in a rain date. That would probably include advertising a rain date so people involved would keep it open, as well as adapting waivers so they could be flexible.

In the meantime, Huff said organizers are referring 2015 Big Event volunteers who inquire to KU’s Center for Community Outreach for other volunteer opportunities. They’ve apologized to a lot of unhappy homeowners.

On Monday, they gave away food outside the Kansas Union and took leftover fruit — a lot of leftover fruit, Huff said — to a local charity.

They’ve crammed gloves and other tools into their two campus storage sheds and an off-site storage unit.

The roughly 3,600 Big Event 2015 T-shirts they ordered cost about $12,000, Wilkin said. As for those, volunteers who haven’t claimed them already can pick theirs up at the Kansas Union Programs office through the end of this semester.