Requiescat in pace Smiley

If you want to know what’s going to happen to Grand Forks’ Smiley water tower, take a look at the photos on these Web sites:

• Here’s the Web site of Iseler Demolition, the contractor involved in tomorrow’s demolition. These guys specialize in destroying water towers.
• Here’s a water tower at an Army base in New York.
• Here’s one from Minooka, Ill.
• Here’s one from Fairfield, Ohio. And another.
• Here’s one from Orillia, Ont.

I really dig Smiley and I’m gonna miss him when he goes, but it’s interesting to think about how construction workers go about the task of demolishing the 130-foot tall water tower. I did the graphic explaining how that’s done and talked to Donavan Voeller from AE2S, who will be supervising the work, as part of my research.

I was envisioning how I would do the graphic while in the shower this morning and guessed that workers would be cutting Smiley apart into pieces small enough to fit on a truck. But Donavan said they’d actually cut big chunks out of Smiley, lower them to the ground with a crane and then cut them into little pieces.

Then I got the idea of calling Iseler Demolition to see if other people love their water towers, too. The secretary Carolyn Kramer answered and said that, yes, people do miss their water towers and some of them don’t even have smileys on them. Sometimes the water tower has the logo of the city or county on it and sometimes, she said, people just remember how they used to climb (illegally) on top of the towers and looked over their cities.

Iseler Demolition destroys about 100 water towers a year.