By Katie MacBride, Online Editor-in-Chief
The construction process on the new Kill Devil Hills water tower is approaching a close, as the current water tower is retiring after 56 years of operation.
On Jan. 22, 2019, construction on the town’s new water tower began with an expected finish of Feb. 1, 2020. The plans for this new tower started back in 2015 and 2016 when the current water tower reached 50 years of age – the average lifespan of a water tower. Due to the increasing age of the tower plus the amount of money it costs to repaint water towers, plans were designed and approved by the town for the new-and-improved water tower.
According to Kill Devil Hills town engineer Pete Burkhimer in the video “Kill Devil Hills Water Tower Replacement Project” by the Outer Banks Voice, “The cost of repainting these tanks is more than the average person might think. When we repainted the other tank at the south end of town – the 8th Street tank – that was about $230,000.”
Repainting of the towers is not only expensive, but the paint is supposed to help keep the water tower in good condition and reduce rusting. To help with this issue, the new tower has a new design, Kill Devil Hills Mayor Ben Sproul said in an interview with Nighthawk News.
“The idea being that you paint it with the roller, it goes on thicker; you put on four layers all at once, it makes it a really thick membrane on the outside that protects all of that metal from rusting,” Sproul explained. “Hopefully with the design that it has – less surface area without all those legs and support structures like the old one – that the coating will keep the salt in the air off, make it last for a long time and not have to be painted as often as the last one.”
Even though people drive past water towers every day in every town, they often don’t think about them until seeing a new one going up. That begs the question: What is a water tower and why do we have them?
“The idea of a water tower is you take whatever water source that you have and you pump it with a mechanical pump up to the top, fill it up to a certain level, and that weight of all the water – you can imagine a gallon of water is about eight pounds and times 200,000, it’s really heavy – all that pressure pushes the water into the pipes all through the town, and that’s why the water squirts out of your tap when you turn on the faucet in your kitchen,” Sproul explained. “So instead of having to use a mechanical pump to push the water all the time, this just uses gravity.”
To improve the efficiency of pumping water through town, the new tower can hold 400,000 gallons of water compared to the old water tower that only held 200,000 gallons.
The new water tower’s design also received a lot of attention during the construction back in October. Several pictures of the in-process tower were shared all over social media commenting on its appearance, and jokes about it were mentioned on a number of newspaper websites, television stations and radio broadcasts in places like Charlotte. The Observer wrote an entire story about the tank and how after it was constructed, but before it was raised, it was said to look like “the world’s largest bong.” Rather than be upset about the reference to drug paraphernalia, Sproul chose to look on the bright side.
“I am a glass half-full kind of guy, so I like to think that all publicity is good publicity,” Sproul said. “If people saw the posts and didn’t know where Kill Devil Hills was, it gave them a reason to look it up and figure out, ‘Hey, I might want to go there on vacation,’ then that’s probably good for everybody here.”
With the new tower standing tall, what’s on tap next is the removal of the old structure. Given its location near the fire station, a shopping center, athletic fields and the bypass, that will be more of a challenge than usual.
“Usually they cut a leg out, then it just falls over,” Sproul said. “But because this water tower is in a tight space with a lot of other buildings around it, they’re going to have to cut it apart and lower the pieces down one by one.”
Junior Katie MacBride can be reached at [email protected].
