We’ve got an empty water tank at my site that we need to get back in order for a tenant that wants to use it. It’s huge: 700,000 gallons and 40 feet high. I emptied it out years ago in my previous job because one of the enormous pipes underground was leaking somewhere. We couldn’t find the minor leak and nobody was using it at the time, so I just dumped the water. It has sat empty for at least five years now, slowly rusting.

It’s not a drinking water storage tank, but since it’s connected to my water system, I’m somewhat in charge of the water in it. It’s a deluge tank for fire supression in the big hangars. A deluge system is no wimpy fire sprinkler system; when that alarm goes off, the whole world gets flooded all at once.

 

Four big diesel engines power pumps that move a lot of water in a hurry through a 24″ pipe to the top of the affected hangar. I would really not want to be standing underneath that kind of hydraulic power when it went off. I sincerely hope they have some sort of warning system to get the people out of the way, because 700,000 gallons dropping on you all at once would be somewhat dramatic. If the impact didn’t kill you, the drowning would.

 

So the customer wants the tank filled up. I had to go look at the mechanisms at the top, even though I very much didn’t want to. Have I mentioned that I’m quite afraid of heights? Glen took me up on the manlift and I carefully did not look down. Mostly I pointed my camera at things and let it do the seeing while I concentrated on not throwing up or crying.

 

I haven’t decided if I’m going to fill it before they fix the liner or not. It depends on their estimates; I’d think it would be cheaper to work on dry, even with confined-space procedures, than to have divers do it. I’m going to have to be right there in either case, because it’s mine and I don’t trust the tenant to take as much care of my equipment as I would. That part will be very interesting; I missed the last inspection and repair of our water storage tank.

It’s going to take me days to fill it through that little two-inch line. It will take five hours of our big pumps running, and they have to keep the regular water system supplied too. It’s going to be a huge demand on our little system, but at the end, we should have a working deluge system again.