July 16, 2009

A fun day

I am a member of the Water Board for our small town - there are about 300 hookups ranging from people's vacation mobile homes to a large Gas Station and Laundromat. The water is pumped from a well up to two storage tanks on a hill in back of the town. Every year, one of those tanks is drained, pressure washed, filled with a dilute Chlorine solution for 24 hours, drained, refilled and put back into service. We have an engineer on the payroll but all the other labor is volunteer. As the water board does not own a pressure washer (they used to rent one), I offered to let them use mine. Went up today to deliver it to the tanks. When you talk about a 30,000 gallon water tank, you can visualize that this is a @#$% of a lot of water but to actually be standing in an empty 30,000 gallon tank is a humbling experience. It is about 20 feet in diameter, 15 feet tall. It takes a different speech technique to be understood as the reverberation builds up so quickly that you can only speak for five seconds before it is impossible to hear. You have to wait twenty seconds for it to die back down again. I am planning next year when we do the big tank (50,000 gallons) to spend the day there with a recorder and some musical toys gathering fun sounds. The reverberation is quite unlike that you get electronically. Who would think that the rural hamlet of Maple Falls would have its own Silophone... Posted by DaveH at July 16, 2009 6:27 PM
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