Jacob Dimond / jake@yelmonline.com
Yelm Public Works Director Cody Colt recently provided an update to the Nisqually Valley News on the recently constructed water structure on the corner of Walmart Boulevard and 103rd Street.
He said the tower will double the City of Yelm’s water-holding capacity.
In an interview on Monday, Sept. 8, Colt said the new tower can hold up to 1.5 million gallons of water, whereas Yelm’s current capacity for water reservoirs currently sits around 1.6 million gallons.
“It’s doubling the amount of water we can store, capacity-wise. It’s huge for a city as large as us. If there’s an emergency or if firefighters have to fight something for an extended period of time, that extra storage gives them the ability to do that,” Colt said. “That was one of the areas, our water systems are located centrally and up on the hill at Tahoma Boulevard, so this was the area that didn’t have storage capacity near it. Getting one on that side of town was extremely important. Now we have a framework across the city of water storage areas so those systems can be isolated but have pressure zones or towers near them. It’s really helpful to have one in this location.”
Colt added that Yelm will begin to fill up the water tank at a slow pace in October. He expects the tank to be full by the end of November. According to the public works director, Yelm began preparing for this structure in late 2021 and early 2022 after the city gained new water rights.
“We’ll time this process. The benefit is that the summer is our high demand time. October, demand starts to taper off because the rain comes and people don’t water their grass as much. There should be no impact to the people around it or the city itself,” Colt said. “In late 2021, early 2022, once we received water rights, we knew our next issue would be storage capacity. As soon as the trigger happened, when we learned water rights were going to come in, we started working on this project. It’s been in conception for a couple of years, but we really started working on it in 2021.”
Once the project officially concludes and the tower is full of water, Colt said he estimates the total project cost at $5.1 million. He said growth within the city paid for the project.
“That’s why we have not had to raise water rates at all over the last four years to pay for this. The growth is paying for the water tower,” he said.
According to Colt, an artist will soon visit the new tower and begin painting a mural on it. Additionally, he noted the tower aligns with the rest of the towers in Yelm.
“The actual tower had to get painted first, and the muralist comes out and paints it by hand. He’ll come up and start painting the mural now,” Colt said. “All of our towers are the same height, even though they’re different heights in terms of their actual build because of the elevation of Yelm. Some towers look smaller. But they’re all the same height. If you get on top of the water tower, you can see all of the other towers in Yelm and line yourself up with them.”
