Tank Project Sets Stage for City?s Growth
A city in Alabama has a new three- million-gallon water tank, the result of cooperation between the city?s leaders and project leaders. The tank, located in the city of Sylacauga, also was built with consideration of a nearby airport.
?This will be the master tank for our future water system for the next 10, 15 or maybe 20 years,? said Darol Russell, superintendent of the Water and Wastewater Department of the Sylacauga Utilities Board.
The community of 17,000 is located about 45 miles southeast of Birmingham. Built at a cost of $1,150,000, the all-welded steel tank stands 87 feet high and has a diameter of 76 feet. It features a self-supporting roof (no internal supports) and a ?knuckle? (rounded) transition from sidewalls to roof.
Its most conspicuous feature, however, is its appearance. Because it is located just one mile from the Sylacauga Municipal Airport, it was mandatory that the towering structure be visible to private pilots approaching the area. This was accomplished by painting the tank with alternating 12-foot-wide stripes of red and white.
The five-man crew completed the tank on Oct. 15, 1999, two weeks ahead of schedule, but none too soon for the city of Sylacauga. The new tank, Sylacauga?s 11th and largest, is considered vital to the city?s plans for handling present needs and future growth as new industrial plants and more people come to the area.
Sylacauga?s tanks also handle the water needs of the nearby towns of Fayetteville and Stewartville.
A new water treatment plant, at the junction of the clear-water Cedar Creek and the Coosa River, now is in planning and is expected to be operational in about five years. In anticipation, the city obtained a permit from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to ultimately withdraw 30 mgd. The new treatment plant will supplement the present treatment plant on Lake Howard, which has a capacity of only 6 mgd.
The new tank has enabled the Utilities Board to increase water pressure for some homeowners who needed it. In the industrial sector, the tank is serving the needs of a nearby industrial park and is expected to accommodate a new automotive component plant scheduled to open in Sylacauga next year.
Project Manager John Fisher of Fisher Tank calls the project a ?textbook example? of how a water tank project should come together. ?This one ranks very high in every respect,? he said.
Fisher, who is Fisher Tank Company?s contract engineer for sales in the Mid-South area, cited several reasons why he considered the job a textbook project.
Essential to the job was good advance planning, done by design engineering firm Gary Owen & Associates of Hoover.
?It was a very cooperative effort from the beginning,? Fisher said. ?Owen had studied and planned the project very thoroughly, allowing enough time to do the job, and preparing a specification which was complete and to-the-point, accurately representing site conditions, so there were no unanswered questions.?
Also important was accident-free performance. If proper safety procedures are not followed, tank construction can be a dangerous business and the possibility of serious accident is always present.
?Not only did we have no lost-time accidents, we had no accidents whatsoever,? Fisher said.
The construction itself also went without a hitch ? from the clearing of the site on a small wooded hill about four miles from the center of town, through the building of an access road, to the laying of a concrete ringwall and erection of the tank, beginning on Feb. 9, 1999.
The peppermint candy cane paint job was done completely in the field.
?Many water tanks are primed in the shop,? Fisher noted, ?but this one was 100 percent sand-blasted, primed and painted in the field. This included three coats of epoxy paint on the interior and two coats of epoxy (primer and intermediate coat), plus a urethane finish, on the outside. The task took all summer and involved five painters employed by ECO Paint of Pompano Beach, Fla.?