My dad had no formal education beyond high school (Class of 1933), but he knew many interesting and useful things. One of the first concepts I remember Daddy explaining to me was how our small-town water system worked. The most obvious feature was the 140-foot tall water tower near the center of town. He said water from the town well was pumped up to the tank until the tank was full, then the pump automatically shut off. Water could run down from the tank to any and every home in our mile-square town, whenever anyone turned on a faucet. Gravity worked all the time; the electric pump worked only now and then, as needed to keep the big high tank pretty much full.
And, yes, he admitted, he had indeed climbed the tall ladder to see our whole little flat-and-level town from way up there. I realized much later, from atop a farm silo, that he could probably have seen all the way to Indianapolis, almost 20 miles to the south.
Sadly, in spite of being an honest Purdue Boilermaker engineer, that’s about all I know about municipal water supply layout and operation. Oh, when the local water company was running new pipes out here in Lookout Valley a decade or so ago, I learned that they have numerous buried, ignored and forgotten pipes and valves in our neighborhood that can do some very useful, or very inconvenient, things but that’s another tale for another day.
This morning at 7 a.m. I discovered that we had very little water pressure, therefore very little water flow – and even that was rapidly decreasing. I was able to draw about three pints into a pitcher, and that was it. First I checked downstairs for leaks (none), then I made sure that I had paid the water bill (yes), then I waited. And the water company called at 8:05 a.m., explaining that there was a major break in the mains somewhere near South Scenic Highway. Their website indicated a very large area west of Moccasin Bend and Lookout Mountain that is without water and likely will be dry all day. So I supposed that was that; it won’t be fun, but we will survive.
Then I began to wonder: Within sight of my home, barely 700 yards away, is a big, high water tower. Really big and really high. My estimates are that the tank itself is 60 feet diameter and about 30 feet tall, which translates into some 600,000 gallons. That’s a lot of water. Farther north in Lookout Valley, up beside Elder Mountain Road, is a smaller tank at ground level that probably holds 60,000 gallons. Barring difficulties, then, there should have been a whole lot of water stored and ready to serve our valley today, even if a big pipe did burst somewhere on the other side of Lookout Mountain.
So where did all the water go – all of the water that was already out here in the valley, sitting high and pretty, just waiting to run downhill through our pipes and into our homes? Every water pumping system I’ve ever seen, beginning with the old-fashioned lever-action hand-pumping variety, has a check valve – a one-way valve – to keep water from running backwards. The water can only run one way, up and out to where it’s wanted. And if there is indeed a big check valve at the bottom of the nearby water tower, why wasn’t / isn’t that water available to us here in the valley?
I know from reading years of water bills that my wife and I typically use 100 gallons a day – that’s 50 gallons per day per person, maybe a bit conservative, but a reasonable average. The population of Lookout Valley is hard to determine, but it’s evidently somewhere between 3,000 and 6,000 people. In the worst case, the tall tank I can see should be enough to supply all of us for many hours before it runs dry – but I’ve not gotten a drop of water since 7 a.m. today.
So where did all that water go? It’s possible, of course, that there isn’t a check valve at the base of that tower, so as soon as the pipe(s) broke over around St. Elmo or wherever, all of those hundreds of thousands of gallons of good water simply ran right back down the hill and are gone back to the river. That’s possible, but it really doesn’t make sense.
What I do know is, I’ve not had any water supply all day today, and I assume neither have many thousands of other people on the west side of Chattanooga. It's not fun, but I suppose we will survive.
In the meantime, I do wonder where all that water went, even while remembering that sometimes the best I can do is to quote Charles Dickens’s Tiny Tim: “God bless us every one!”
Larry Cloud
Larry, I had to laugh reading this, I promise, laughing with you.
My hands are still chilled. I got the hatchet by the wood stove, it has been warm a long time now, the stove that is, and chopped a hole in the ice that is at the top of the full water barrel under a downspout. So we have walking water. Slower than running I know, but that beats no water. As some say, this too will pass.
Now to replace your water main and mine, it got laid about 90 years ago. This section has a bandaid about every 150 feet. It’s only about 1,600 feet long so the frost heave will create more job security for our water company plumbers.
One bad thing to read on these short days is a current assessment of infrastructure such as municipal water. It’ll make you scrub clean the rain water barrel more often.
Prentice Hicks