Gwinnett water towers to be dismantled

“Maybe I shouldn’t say this,” he said.

Oh, go ahead.

“I climbed one of those towers.”

There. It’s out. About 20 years ago, Jackson illicitly ascended 120 feet of steel pipe hard against I-85 in Norcross. He must have looked like an ant crawling up a soup can.

When he got to the top, Jackson took in the view: Atlanta, a series of concrete and granite peaks; rural Georgia, a rumpled green blanket; Stone Mountain, a hazy hump; Cobb County, blacktop tendrils curling.

Directly below: Gwinnett County, where those two water towers erected for practical purposes have become ... well, if not art, certainly landmarks. But not for much longer.

Gwinnett commissioners last month accepted a Norcross firm’s $149,000 bid to dismantle the behemoths along with four other county-owned water-storage and pumping structures. Demolition could start within weeks.

The tanks, close to Jimmy Carter Boulevard, are to Gwinnett what the Big Chicken is to Cobb — landmarks, conversation pieces. They look like giant oatmeal canisters. Their message is as subtle as a shovel to the face. For four decades, they’ve proclaimed that life in Gwinnett is as good as it gets. In their latest guise, they are pale yellow. At one time, they were green; before that, blue.

These days, Jackson, 46, is blue. A landscape architect, his office on Goshen Industrial Parkway backs up to the towers. When he looks out the window, he remembers a younger, not-as-smart version of his present-day self — young Michael, scaling the rungs of a tank ladder. For him, as well as Gwinnett, things were looking up.

“They’re kind of a part of Gwinnett, you know?” said Jackson. “Why not leave them?”

That would be throwing away money, said Lynn Smarr, acting director of Gwinnett County’s Department of Water Resources. The tanks no longer contain water, and maintaining them costs about $40,000 annually, she said.

She recognizes that not everyone is so pragmatic; to some, those tanks are Gwinnett — big and boastful, the best. She also claims to love them, despite living in Barrow County.

“They are near and dear to me, too,” said Smarr. “But I’ve got a business to run.”

Billboards in 3-D

Gaffney, S.C., has the Big Peach; it’s such a popular water tower that Byron, Ga., paid it the greatest compliment: The Peach County town 90 miles south of Atlanta erected its own peach-shaped water tank.

Or consider Luling, Texas, which celebrates its economy with a tower topped by an immense watermelon. Travelers to Edgerton-Newville, Wis., cannot help noticing an apple water tower on the highway into town.

Water towers are big billboards, said Doug Kirby of San Francisco, who knows about such things. In 1986, he published “Roadside America,” a compendium of fiberglass giants, smiley-face water towers, buildings shaped like tea kettles, airplanes converted into restaurants and other highway oddities.

The book has become a Web site (www.roadsideamerica .com) featuring about 8,000 strange things. Georgia, with 63 listings, ranks high on the goofy meter, he said. Gwinnett’s towers did not make the cut — not outlandish enough, Kirby said.

“They [water towers] are a fairly cheap way for an area to market itself,” said Kirby.

A little tank trivia

Things you need to know about the two titans:

● The first tower, closest to the interstate, was built in 1968; its twin came along four years later.

● Each tower proclaims “Gwinnett Is Great” and “Success Lives Here.” The slogans are painted on opposite sides, though, meaning you only see one message at a time.

● The towers’ combined capacity: 2 million gallons.

● A vandal with a high-powered rifle years ago shot a hole near the top of one tower, forcing the county to lower its water level until a hardy soul could patch it.

● It takes 39 gallons of paint to coat each tower. The last paint job, in 2000, cost $183,000. The Coca-Cola Co. once considered painting them to resemble soaring Coke cans, but the idea lost its fizz.

“They’re more proportional to a Coors Light can anyway,” offered Neal Spivey. As director of Gwinnett’s water production, Spivey oversees a system of pumps and pipes that last year delivered 22 billion gallons of water to Gwinnett residents and businesses. Until 2009, when they were drained following system improvements, the Norcross towers were part of that watery equation.

Some enterprising business types suggested using the tanks for illuminated ads — a light, after all, has more advertising oomph than faded paint — but the county decided against it.

“We’re not in the advertising business,” Spivey said.

‘It’s just progress’

Don Barillari is in the destruction business — has been since he dismantled an icebox and sold the parts 50 years ago. Today, he’s vice president of Tristar Demolition Inc., the Norcross firm that will take apart the towers. Tristar has 280 days to remove them from their perch over the big I.

How does one go about removing enough steel to build a commercial trawler? A smile wiggled into Barillari’s reply.

“How do you build one?” he asked. “From the ground up. You take it down the opposite way — from the top down.”

Wielding cutting torches, workers will slowly take apart the structures until the two towers are one big mountain of steel shards. Barillari figures they comprise 100,000 to 150,000 tons — truly enough for building commercial ships, a big market for recycled sheet steel.

A resident of Duluth, Barillari knows the towers as well as his neighbors. But he’s not as sentimental as some of them.

“Today, kids are 6, 7 years old, and they have computers,” said Barillari. “It’s all just progress.”

Progress? Hmmm.

Cobb Countians, better keep an eye on the Big Chicken.

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Towering statements

Prodigious produce, chamber of commerce boasts, the enigmatic smile: Towers across the United States do more than contain water. Here are but a few, as pictured online: