A new water tower will join the City of Baldwin’s expanding infrastructure this summer.
The new water tower will replace the old silo-type tower on Light Road in Baldwin, and will increase the amount of water available to the city. The tower is on schedule to be completed by July, according to Fletcher Holliday of Engineering Management Incorporated (EMI). Holliday addressed the Baldwin City Council about the water tower project during the Council’s meeting Monday night.
“The tower itself … is going to change the landscape and sometimes water towers make the landscape kind of attractive,” Mayor Joe Elam said. “I hope that that’s what we see. It’ll match the other tank, but from a perspective of better water pressures and things like that, I hope the public recognizes that sometimes you have to have these things hanging in the air to provide that kind of service.”
This new tower will also allow the city’s other tower to reach full capacity, so in addition to the 500,000 gallons of water the new tower will provide, the other tower will be able to fill to maintain an additional 30,000-50,000 gallons of water.
Elam says the water infrastructure that the city has is decades old, and new infrastructure, like this water tank and improvements coming to their water pipeline, are needed to provide Baldwin water customers with the service they need.
“The reality is the region as a whole needs to really improve [water] storage in order for this community to be a drought protected,” Elam says. “And we need to have a lot of storage, and this is just one of those components.”
The project overall will cost the city $1,088,715.
