Water for the entire campus at work is fed by a well. Water is pumped 24/7 at a continuous rate from the well into a very large water tower that is also on our campus.

The tower is very old. I think I heard it was built in the 1960's. A few weeks ago they started a project to totally rehabilitate the tower. They are sandblasting the structural walls both inside and out, and they are sandblasting the actual water tank inside and out. When they are done with that the entire structure will be painted, inside and out.

When they are sandblasting the exterior they raise a curtain around the entire thing to keep the paint from covering everyone's garden, blowing into their windows, etc. I wonder if the paint is lead based too.



This project is going to take two or three months to finish. To keep the campus supplied water while the tower is out of service they brought in a PortaTower and plumbed it into the water system. Once a week or so another water tanker comes in to refill this tanker. I think the orange industrial air compressor on the right side of the picture is what creates the water pressure to charge the whole system since we can't use gravity. The big black rubber hose snaking in the window is, of course, how the water gets from the tanker to where it taps into the internal water main.



When I first heard that the water tower was going to be out of service for a few months my first thought was they were going to drop off a few PortaPotties in the parking lot. I imagined people passing out from spending five minutes doing their business in the stinky plastic ovens in the middle of summer when it is humid and over 100°. Thank God someone invented the PortaTower!