New Water Tower in Welcome, Minnesota

Welcome, MN – “Welcome had an existing tank that was probably there for 100 years. An old cone-top tank,” said Troy Werdel, Chief Estimating and Project Management Officer for Maguire Iron.

“It was time for a new tank, new upgrades,” Werdel said, “So what we did is build them a new tank on the exact same site. It is an updated style, the single-pedestal spheroid.”

“Most projects last about a year. From start to finish it’s about a year project and they are only dealing with just Maguire Iron for the entire year,” Werdel said.

“The engineers, they are heavily involved with the project but they rely on the experts so to say, so we’ve done hundreds of tanks and we can do everything. It’s a huge comfort level,” Werdel said. “It’s one pay app, one person talking to them, it’s one source and they know it’s getting taken care of.”

“We run the schedule, we run the employees, the workers, the subcontractors. We run it all. It’s a piece of mind for them,” Werdel said.”

“In the design phase, we get in there. We subcontract the foundation work out and on this particular one, it was a little unique,” Werdel said. “For the painting portion of it, we painted it on the ground actually because of the location in town. It was a tight spot, there were houses around. It was right in the middle of the city so we ended up painting it on the ground and erected it from there before coming in and putting on the finish coats.”

We hire the electricians, the site work, the tank demo work and it was a turn-key project,” said Werdel.

They have to have their water so when we are building a tank, they have to have their existing water source that’s there,” Werdel said. “In a situation like this and probably seventy percent of the tanks we do, we have some sort of demolition that is involved with it. With the demolition, there is a lot of coordination towards the end of it. The underground water lines are tied to the existing system and we have to tie into the new system. Then with that new system, once it’s commissioned, online, disinfected and can be used by the community, then we can go in and shut the old system off and take their old tank down.”

“You can see by the pictures of the new tank that we did, we put a nice logo on there. In the City of Welcome they have a really old watering station and so we painted that logo on the new system and it’s just a huge billboard for the city. The existing tank, you couldn’t put a logo like that on there. You wouldn’t be able to see it and it wouldn’t look as good.” said Werdel.

With the new tank you can and it’s their landmark now,” said Werdel. “It’s Welcome’s tank. It’s going to be their pride and joy for the next hundred years.”