July/August 2006

“Providing and Protecting Kenosha’s Greatest Natural Resource…Water”

New Storage Tank on the Horizon

Wastewater Laboratory

Receives Much-Needed

Facelift

Actually, the opposite is true.  It took several months just to hammer out the design parameters for the tank, such as volume, height, location, type of tank, etc., and then prepare the plans and specifications to be sent out to prospective bidders.  The tank was designed by Ruekert-Mielke, a design consulting firm located in Waukesha,  Wisconsin.  The Construction contract was awarded in the fall of 2004 to Maguire Iron, Inc., from Sioux Falls, South Dakota.  It wasn’t until the spring of 2005 that the concrete foundation was poured.  The foundation then sat curing in the ground for almost another year, while the tank was being fabricated at facilities in Sioux Falls.  In the spring of 2006, select pieces of cold-rolled, shop-primed metal began arriving at the project site.  A team of welders soon followed and

began the painstaking process of stitching the pieces of the tank together. 

It has been more than 20 years since the laboratory spaces at the Wastewater Treatment Plant were renovated.  It has been said that history has a way of repeating itself.  This is especially true in the case of the Wastewater Laboratory, since all of the wood laboratory casework had been completely removed during the last renovation and replaced with much more durable steel casework—at least it was thought to be at the time.  Now more than 20 years later, we find ourselves replacing all the steel casework, now severely rusted and worn, with new wood casework.  We sincerely hope that when history comes to  judge the past once again, that the decision to install wood casework will have been a good one.  Only time will tell.

(Continued on page )

If you look to the horizon west of the City next to Interstate 94, you will see a new 750,000 gallon elevated storage tank standing tall.   This tank was erected so quickly, that if you didn’t know better, you think that someone hadmysteriously sowed some kind of seed into the ground and then carefully watered and fertilized the site until the tank began to sprout.

It took almost four months to assemble a myriad of geometric shapes into five unique and separate sections of the tank, each weighing about 50 tons. Finally, a gigantic crane arrived on site to      hoist the sections into place.  As miraculous as it may sound, it took only      three days to complete the task of erecting the tank.  It is even more amazing when you consider that the entire tank could have been erected in one day, if the weather had been more cooperative.