Water Towers – Page 5 – Thirsty in Suburbia

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.

A floor plan that flows well

in Water Towers/by Gayle Leonard

From the Sudbury Star, Ontario, Canada, this interesting “development:”

People may soon be living in old water tower
If a Greater Sudbury developer gets his way, people will soon be living in an abandoned water tower on Pearl Street. Westar Investments Inc. already has permission to build office space, banquet facilities and a restaurant in the 34-metre-high tower, which oversees the city’s downtown area. But Westar now wants to add dwelling units and needs to change the old tower’s special commercial zoning to do so.

Westar Investments is headed by Cory Prause, a local engineer who has been pursuing a conversion of the water tower into commercial space since 2004. The plan is based on the successful conversion of an abandoned water tower into a restaurant in Lethbridge, Alta., several years ago.

The swell photo is from the Flickr page of AndredeSudbury.

I have four news feeds to the right; one feeds a news search for “water towers”, another for “freak” accidents involving water, the third for “water main break” and the last (Hot News) picks up “boil water” headlines. This news item today from Gallatin, Missouri hit all four feeds…

The city of Gallatin watched 626,000 gallons of water go down the drain Saturday, August 9. The problem was caused by a water line break inside the clear well located at the water plant east of town around 8 or 9 a.m. on Saturday morning, according to City Administrator Zac Johnson.

“It drained the system completely,” he said. “And there was no way to shut it off.”

The clear well is a huge cement tank in the ground that holds 300,000 gallons of water. After the water is treated it is put in the clear well and from there goes to the water towers. When the line broke, the water from the towers backed up into the clear well. Mr. Johnson said he thought the water towers were close to full since it happened early in the morning. The old water tower runs 75,000 gallons and the new water tower runs 250,000 gallons. The system is interconnected.

A diving crew came Saturday about 2 p.m. and checked the clear well and discovered that a pipe had come apart. The clear well had to be emptied in order for a crew to get in to fix it.

Mr. Johnson said he wasn’t sure what caused the pipe to separate. “It wasn’t like it was an old line that had corroded. Where two pieces hooked together, it just came apart.”

He added that it was not something that could have been discovered by a routine check of the pipes. “It was a freak thing that happened,” he said.

About 12 midnight Saturday, the pipe was fixed and the city started producing water again. The city is now trying to refill the water towers and restore normal water service.

“The big issue now is for people to conserve as much as possible until we get off this boil order,” Mr. Johnson said. He thought the boil order might last another week or possibly two.