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What is this thing? @lemmy.world

Zachariah @lemmy.world

1mo ago

What are these wires on this water tower? What is their purpose?

Why are these wires on this water tower? What do they do?

Update:

Caught it with the curtain up!

23 comments

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.
- 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.
- 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.

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.

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.

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.

Those spikes keep dragons from perching on the tower. Simple, but incredibly effective!

Just speculating, some sort of elaborate lightning rod system?

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.

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.

They're bird suicide prevention cables. Now birds won't be able to fly directly into the tower to kill themselves.

Those are barnacle tongues. If you touch them, they start pulling you up towards their mouth.

- Giving answers on that is exactly what this community is for.

23 comments