Ellicott City Water Tank Gets a Makeover

Who gets to choose the color of a water tank?

“I ask everyone,” John Schaeffer said, “but nobody wants to pick, so it stays the same color.”

Schaeffer is an engineer with the Howard County Department of Public Works. I called to ask some questions about the Bethany Elevated Water Tank, which is currently draped in tarps. I wanted to know what was going on.

Well, the answer was obvious, I suppose: The water tank is being painted for the first time since 1986. But I didn’t know that the inside and the outside of the tank are getting an upgrade. Painting is done for two reasons: to make the tank look nice, but also to protect the metal from rusting.

Bethany is one of the smallest capacity tanks in Howard County. It holds 200,000 gallons of drinking water. From there, they range in size up to the largest tank in the county, in Sikesville, which  holds 3 million gallons. Aside from storage, the tank controls water pressure for the nearly 25 million gallons of water used in the county daily. 

So how did Schaeffer choose that familiar water-tank-light-blue color? 

First off, it's cheap to keep all of the tanks the same, single color. To paint a design—say, stripes—would just be too expensive, he said. 

As it is, to blast off the old paint and paint three coats of epoxy inside and out costs about $10 per square-foot.

"For this tank," Schaeffer said, "that's about $135,000."

But there's another reason he stuck with blue.

"It’s my opinion that you want to match the sky as much as possible," Schaeffer said. "You don’t want it to stand out too much." 

Work should be completed on the tank this weekend or early next week.