Water towers

 

 

We see them in every small town; sometimes more than one per town.  Port Aransas has two.

 

They’re probably in every big town too, but they’re really conspicuous in small towns on flat land, like the Midwest, and South Texas.  Ever wonder what they’re for?  Are they like those standpipes for irrigation systems that took me so long to figure out; giant burp holes to let out sudden excess pressure?  Are they storage devices randomly built in the sky?  There are so many shapes and sizes; are they doing different things?

 

I had to look it up.

 

Water towers provide constant pressure for the water supply.  Put some water up high and gravity wants to bring it back down.  Tie that into your water system, and suddenly it’s pressurized.  The higher you put the water, the more pressure it provides.  You can make the tower look like anything you want.  They all do the same thing; provide pressure.

 

So you put enough water up in a tower to provide about one day’s supply for the community.  The minimum height to supply enough pressure from gravity is about 80 feet.  That will give you maybe 35psi.  The more pressure you want in your water system, the higher you build the tower.  Many municipal water systems want to maintain 50 to 100 psi, so their water towers are much higher.

 

With a water tower, not only have you established the right amount of pressure, but you only need to buy a pump big enough to handle the average daily usage for the town.  Maybe a city averages using 500 gallons of water per minute over the course of 24 hours, but peak demand might be 2,000 gallons per minute.  Using a tower with one day’s water in reserve means they only have to buy a 500 gallon per minute pump, not a 2,000 gallon per minute pump!  It’s not a static system; it’s dynamic.  Water from the tank gets used every day, then the tank gets filled back up at night.

 

If your pump breaks, you’ve got a backlog of one day’s worth of water.  You’ve got a day to fix the pump before anyone even knows it’s broken.  And of course, this tower in the sky is the perfect place to promote your local high school team.