Bangor’s newest water tank, which the city started using Tuesday, has double the capacity of the Thomas Hill Standpipe and is more than three times the height of the city’s Paul Bunyan statue.
After water tests on Monday came back clean and the structure passed all necessary inspections, the Bangor Water District began using the newly constructed water tank, located near the corner of Cleveland Street and Venture Way in Bangor.
Crews were pressure-washing the structure on Tuesday afternoon and will next apply a sealant to weatherproof the exterior, said Chuck Harrison, general manager of Bangor Water District.
The structure is nearly 110 feet tall, with an internal diameter of 74 feet, according to Harrison. The structure can hold roughly 3.3 million gallons of water, which is more than twice the capacity of the 1.5-million-gallon Thomas Hill Standipe.
The water district has several water tanks around the city that provide clean drinking water to residents and can be used to help extinguish fires in an emergency.
Created in 1957, the Bangor Water District is an independent municipal department that supplies water to 10,700 accounts across seven communities — Bangor, Eddington, Hampden, Orrington and parts of Clifton, Hermon and Veazie. The district also provides water to the Hampden Water District for distribution.
The new cylinder is both the tallest one in Bangor and of its kind in the United States, according to Harrison.
“For context, one could stack three Paul Bunyan statues on top of each other and still have 16 feet before hitting the ceiling,” Harrison said.
The tank was built onsite by DN Tanks, which bid about $6 million for the project. Beginning last year, concrete was poured into the form of the standpipe, then walls were erected one-by-one. Crews strung more than 260 miles of high tension wire around the outside of the tank to compensate for the pressure inside it, Harrison said.
While this type of water tank is common across the country, its size makes it unique, Harrison said.
In addition to constructing the new tank, the water district also replaced many aging water mains to accommodate this expansion and built a new pump station to help supply water to customers, Harrison said. That additional work took several years and brought the total project cost to roughly $12 million.
This tank will replace the roughly 80-year-old red-and-white-checked standpipe, which sits across the street from the new one, and the more than 60-year-old tank on Hammond Street. Both of those tanks are steel.
Both aging tanks will be demolished. Work to tear down the standpipe on Hammond Street will begin in a few weeks, Harrison said, but the timeline to dismantle the red-and-white-checked structure is uncertain.
