Why are these wires on this water tower? What do they do?
Are they always there? Looks like they are getting ready to hang a curtain around it before painting it, or some other type of maintenance.
this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2025
140 points (98.6% liked)
What is this thing?
6513 readers
47 users here now
Let us help you identify that mysterious object you’ve found.
Currently in CHALLENGE mode: If you've got something obscure knocking about, post a picture, and let's see how we do. Please prefix such posts with "CHALLENGE:" so we know we've got a fighting chance.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
That's what this is for. They'll hang a large curtain around it to keep primer and paint overspray from drifting throughout the neighborhood.
I heard about when a road ferry was being repainted in Sweden, it was done outside and without any curtain a hundred or so meters from a main motorway.
The company doing the repainting had to deal with a lot of insurance claims...
I doubt that. If the way you're applying paint means you're losing so much to the air that you could damage nearby property, you might want to rethink your method. Paint is expensive.
When spray painting you want to control the wind as it WILL waste a lot of your paint and will interfere with the evenness of the paint application. And prevent outside dust from ruining your fresh paint coat.
You would be very surprised to know how little paint it takes to damage shit. My uncle owns a painting business, and he's complained so many times about having to go back out to a site to fix an over spray issue where it's just little flecks of paint where it wasn't supposed to be.
And that's at ground level/inside. Imagine how much worse those issues would be if you were accidentally dispersing paint over a decent area around you. Plus, since it's falling paint, you run the risk of hitting windshields and shit.
For over a decade they weren’t there. They’ve now been there for I think a couple months.
How would they help with maintenance?
If they needed to do painting or masonry work in the winter they'd need to tarp in to keep the material from freezing.
And to make sure the next 50 meters downwind doesn't end up watertower-coloured.
It’s spring with nearly summer temps. Haven’t seen tarps when it was cooler.
Those spikes keep dragons from perching on the tower. Simple, but incredibly effective!
The easiest easy for a small town to make some easy money is to turn their water tower into one of those carnival rides that spin people around on long ropes.
Occam's Razor 🧐
I don't know, installing razors around the ride sounds dangerous.
That's what makes it fun
Ohh how special, water towers only bloom every 50+ years. Once it flowers and is hopefully pollinated by bald eagles, it will make thousands of new water tower seeds. Next spring the city is going to have to go around a pick all the little water towers that they don't want to grow into new big water towers.
This wires around the top and sides of the water tower are temporary safety lines often used during construction or maintenance work. Most likely this water tower will have some repairs done to it in the near future.
You know that cup-in-ball string game? Well imagine the cup is 10 storeys high, and imagine that instead of one ball on a string, there's hundreds.
It's pretty difficult to get all those balls in the cup in one go, so it's been there for decades waiting for the The Promised One to come and perform the Move of all Moves to put all ends to rights, and sup the milk of paradise.
Just speculating, some sort of elaborate lightning rod system?
Base jumping. Funding is difficult, so the local water utility has started charging admission. €10 for access to the lines, and €20 to clip on.
Those are barnacle tongues. If you touch them, they start pulling you up towards their mouth.
They're bird suicide prevention cables. Now birds won't be able to fly directly into the tower to kill themselves.