Someone’s getting fired for this.

A real good ol’ boy would impress his buddies by shooting beer cans off fence posts. Who couldn’t hit this target? From WYFF4.com, some idiot started the New Year with a bang.

Town’s Water Supply Drains From Bullet Holes; Water Tower Shot With High-Powered Rifle

MAIDEN, N.C. — January 1, 2008 — In the midst of an extreme drought, a North Carolina town has lost hundreds of thousands of gallons of water that leaked from bullet holes discovered in the town’s water tower.

Catawba County Sheriff’s Deputy Major Coy Reid said that the tower appears to have been shot three times with a high-powered rifle. Investigators think the shooting happened sometime Monday morning.

Residents told investigators that they had heard the gunshots, but because no one called deputies, the damage was not discovered until hours later.

City officials said that the tower can’t be fixed until most of the water is drained because the repairs will have to be done from inside the holding tank.

Fixing the damage is expected to cost between $15,000 and $20,000 — but that doesn’t include the value of the water lost during the Southeast’s worst drought in more than a century.

Thanks, Flickr-er dwhokins1970 for this shot before the shooting of the Maiden water tower.