Water towers

My avatar is looking up the skirt of the water tower in Oakridge Oregon.

 

In Collinsville, IL (Metro St. Louis) ....and I believe it's for sale.

 

My teen years were spent in a small southern town with a largish water tower. Some enterprising soul(s) climbed it one night and painted a big black rectangle over he city name, then did a very good job of adding “GRIT CITY” in white against the black bar in a font that looked real close to what was used for the city name. The city had no budget item to cover such things so the name remained the same for quite a while until the state gave the city a grant to repaint the whole thing.
Later as an adult, i worked in a plant that fabricated hydrocrackers, floating roof tanks, and other large pressure vessels used in chemical manufacture and storage. We also built water spheres (imagine a golf ball on a tee) and water spheroids (an onion on that same tee). Occasionally we got jobs doing custom tanks. We built the peachoid in Gafney SC and the big peach tank in Clanton AL. The peachoid holds a million gallons and the big peach holds five hundred thousand gallons. I did all the flat plate cutting programming on those two jobs as well as designing the press blocks used to upset the plates used for the bottom teat and the crease that makes them look like a giant set of butt cheeks. They were your basic water spheres with the peach details added strictly as cosmetic details. We submitted a bid to do a candy bar shaped tank for Hershey but we didn’t get the job. Scuttlebutt said it never got built because of concerns over cost.
Here’s the peach tanks.

 

I drove right by most of them. I had to hunt down a couple. It was fun. Like I said, I was in a weird mood today.
I forgot the rusty one at Camp LeJeune. It almost got away from me.


The one with the duck on it is at Grainger Stadium in Kinston. That's the home of the Downeast Wood Ducks baseball team... a Carolina League team that is a farm team for the Texas Rangers. For years the Kinston Indians played there... part of the Cleveland system. It was built in the late 40s and is a cool old school park to watch a game in.

 

That's some cool stuff!

 

Passed the Peachoid many times on 85.

 

this is my tower...



We aren't using it currently because of a $1.4mil bond to repaint it (it was rusting through supposedly)... they are routing water from elsewhere.

My wife and inlaws have lived in the same development since the 70s (inlaws are 10 blocks away)... it used to be wells until they found out the ground water was poison.
DEP to settle Manchester contamination claim for $10M

 

This one is a 1/2 mile from my pad but it's not active


A famous water tower?

 

Saw a lot of this one for a few years:

 

This is where all the cool bassists who use Aguilar Amps hang out.

 

No pic, no renovated water tower
Cool concept... I'd love to see it.

 

You get a new camera, twofer?
Nice images

 

Thanks! Nah, just my Galaxy S8.

Some of these were taken at 60 mph!

 

I did a little research since the only one I could think of was this one in Volunteer Park (nicknamed 'the poor man's Space Needle') >

You can stroll on upstairs for free. Here's the view looking west towards downtown, and an interior shot >


I also learned about one in the northeast Maple Leaf neighborhood >

And another in the western edge's Magnolia Neighborhood that looks like a spaceship >

(Photos are not mine own)

 

Back in 1970 my friends and I went to the top of a watertower in Kent and brought a cigarette and an m-80. We stuck the M-80 fuse perpendicular through the cigarette at about the halfway point, lit the cigarette and placed it on the top of the tower.

We then climbed down and ran back to the car about 200 yards away and watched. It took about ten minutes. It was oddly enjoyable.

 

TalkBass never ceases to amaze me...who knew water towers could be so much fun?

 

As a ham radio guy, I have often wondered how difficult it would be to get one set up on a water tower as opposed to navigating the politics around towers. Hams are usually pretty resourceful, so if it were practical I'm sure they would have found a way.

 

Ha! I have to admit, most of what I was doing yesterday was picking up one piece of equipment and bringing it back....two hour's drive each way. The water tower scavenger hunt gave me a little more "purpose" on an otherwise boring work day.