According to the System’s own project justification, the existing tower maintains water pressure of just 51 to 55 pounds per square inch — no longer enough to meet fire-protection and irrigation demands as new buildings, including the Semiconductor Institute, come online. Every new building at RELLIS currently needs its own separate pumps just to bring water pressure up to code.
The new tower is designed to fix that campus-wide, rather than building by building.
Albritton said reliable utilities are just as important to attracting major projects as the research itself.
“You need two things: electricity and water,” Albritton said. “we have to know we have consistent water that we can, for people that want to come, that we can assure them that water will not be an issue.”
Albritton described the new tower as “an outward sign of making sure everybody realizes we have the water to service whatever it is you want to bring.”
4 Comments
reddig33@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 1d
Where are they going to find the water to fill this tower?
daychilde@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 1d
This is a relatively trivial amount of water we're talking here. It's three times the size of the old tower - but water towers are built to provide pressure for the water pipes, not fill them. It's about pressure, not amount.
reddig33@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 1d
Just thinking about how we seem to continuously be in a drought now across the state.
https://www.mysanantonio.com/news/local/article/texas-water-crisis-22317632.php
daychilde@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 1d
Sure, being worried about drought is a good thing.
Texas uses neary 5 trillion gallons of water per year. It's estimated that the water systems across the state lose around 186 billion gallons of water due to leaky infrastructure.
This new water tower holds around one million gallons of water.
The amount of water lose due to leaks is pretty trivial, and the amount of water lost to leak is around 186,000 times the amount of water this new water tower will hold.
Also, the water tower again is to keep pressure in the system and has little to do with how much of that water is used on an annual basis.
So again. This really is an incredibly trivial issue.
Worrying about this is like renting a crane to pull up a penny from the bottom of a well or something.