Children have day of fun during pump-out
By:John Tredrea
More than the dominant feature of the Pennington skyline, the borough’s water tower arguably is the skyline.
Well over 100 feet tall and built at, or very close to, the highest point in the borough above sea level, the mammoth structure stands in the municipal parking lot, next to Borough Hall off North Main Street.
A key component of the municipal water supply, the tower, which is about 10 yards in diameter, holds 660,000 gallons of water. “Normally, it’s 95 percent full,” Pennington Public Works and Water Department Supervisor Jeff Wittkop said Friday.
The tower is drained to the dregs right now. The reason: scheduled to start Monday was a full-scale refurbishing of its interior. The project is done about once a decade as a routine procedure in the effort to keep borough water quality at a high level.
“An outfit from Kentucky will do the job, which is expected to take four to six weeks,” Mr. Wittkop said. “The inside of the tower will be sandblasted and repainted. They’ll check for pits in the steel. Pits will be ground out, and they’ll do whatever rewelding needs to be done after the pits are removed.”
The tower was emptied during a six-hour period that began late the afternoon of May 9. The Pennington Fire Company tapped into at outlet at the base of the tower and pumped its water through a hose that ran along the driveway connecting Borough Hall to North Main Street. On North Main, the water was discharged from the hose at the top of what decades ago was dubbed Democrat Hill.
The stream of quickly cascading water on an usually warm day for early May provided hours of joy for borough youngsters, who ran in and out of the water or rode it down the hill — sometimes in inner tubes or beach tubes brought along especially for the occasion. Toddlers rode tubes in a smaller stream that ran along the curb on the western side of North Main.
“This is great!” one boy of about 10 bellowed as he rode the water. “They should do this all the time when it gets this hot!”
Sorry, pal. You won’t get another chance until 2010 or so.
In addition to providing the borough, which pumps water from its own wells, with a reserve of nearly a half-million gallons, the tower is an important aspect of fire safety, enabling the borough to make sure there is always enough pressure at all the hydrants in town to deal with a major fire.
Now that the tower is off-line for at least a month, contingency plans have been worked out by Mr. Wittkop and other borough officials, who met with members of the Pennington Fire Company, including Chief Doug Pinelli and Neal Blackwell, one of the company’s veteran resident experts on the complex task of pumping water at fire scenes.
While the tower is being fixed, Mr. Wittkop, who can’t leave town until the job is done, will carry a fire department pager. If there is a fire, he will adjust flows on various pumps at the borough wells to make sure there is enough water pressure at the hydrant nearest the blaze to enable firefighters to deal with it just as they would if the tower were full.
Also while the tower is off-line, adjustments will have to be made at the pumps daily, Mr. Wittkop said, to ensure residential and commercial users in town will have enough water at times of peak demand.