Cisterns

 

We see these giant cement cisterns here.

 

 

Sometimes they’re abandoned and hard to notice.

 

Sometimes they’re still active like this one.  The dark part is from water leaking.

 

We know they have to do with agriculture.  This entire valley is irrigated.  From Colorado, we’re familiar with pivot sprinklers, ditches, gates and headgates, but we can’t quite figure out what the cisterns do.

 

The taller ones are called standpipes, and they help regulate the flow of water, but we still don’t know just how having a tall standpipe helps regulate the flow.  Irrigation systems that are pressurized by pumps have to have valves to regulate the flow, would a valve have to be elevated in a standpipe?

 

Some of them are probably for gravity flow systems and the height of the standpipe relates to the height of the water source, but still, how does the height of the pipe contribute?