Water tower painting isn’t a job for a windy day

MOSES LAKE — Moses Lake’s nine water towers are getting a makeover.

The first to be finished, near the junction of Kittleson Road and state Route 17, got a fresh coat of paint and a giant decal of the city’s new logo and was done on a relatively wind-free Monday afternoon.

“We did the whole thing in one day,” said Jeff Roosa, owner of DPI Graphics in Westland, Michigan.

The work of putting on the giant decal, which Roosa’s company printed on 20-foot long by five-foot wide sheets of vinyl, had to be delayed two weeks because of the Columbia Basin’s nearly ever-present winds, which can make working 100 feet above ground — whether hoisted on a tall crane or dangling down from the top on a lift — precarious.

“The wind has to be under 20 miles per hour,” Roosa said. “But really, under 10 is best.”

Before Roosa and employee Anthony Amorose could apply the new decal, the 157-foot-tall, 1.9 million-gallon water tower had to be repainted. The job took six painters three weeks to cover the tower with three coats of paint.

“You have primer, an intermediate coat, and the final coat,” said Mary Carol Mankin, a site supervisor with HCI Industrial & Marine Coatings.

HCI, which is based in Brush Prairie, Washington, specializes in painting things like water towers, ships and bridges – anything that needs protection from the elements or has to work in a tough environment.

Mankin said the final coat is custom made, and must be applied quickly with power rollers because it’s designed to dry within an hour or two of being exposed to the air. The company needed 100 gallons of the top coat to cover the entire water tower, she added.

Wind is a problem for painters too, said HCI Superintendent Joe Bishop.

“The hard parts of the job are rigging and making sure everybody’s safe and just hoping that you don’t have any wind while you’re doing it,” he said. “Anything over 20 miles per hour and we have to shut down.”

Roosa said his vinyl decal also needs to be specially resistant to UV light. His custom graphics company, which specializes in printing wraps for cars (he has wrapped all the cars in the Indianapolis 500), buses and water towers, prints the wraps in sheets on a special latex printer.

Using a lift, Roosa and Amorose then slowly peel the backs off the sheets while pressing them one at a time to the side of the tower. It’s not all that different — and probably just about as frustrating — as putting a screen protector on your smartphone.

“You still have to apply pressure,” he said. “You squeegee out all the air, and there’s a one-inch overlap on each side, so they all lock together.”

The decal is designed to stay bright for at least seven years, and should last “for 10-15 years easily.”

Painting and decaling the tower also required coordinating work times with T-Mobile, which has a number of cell transmitters on top, in order to keep the paint and decal crews safe, Mankin said.

“We don’t want to irradiate our employees,” she said. “But we don’t want to shut down the tower for three weeks. That’s not helpful for people trying to use their cellphones.”

Moses Lake has nine water towers, each of them set to be repainted and get the city’s new logo. But those will have to wait a bit, so the HCI and DPI crews will go their separate ways to other jobs until they can come back to Moses Lake and do this all over again on another tower.

“We’re working on an elevated tank in Kent, Washington,” Mankin said. “And we’re painting the Pacific Tracker, a U.S. research ship, in Portland, and some barges ... . Those are our immediate projects.”

Roosa, who spoke by phone while boarding a plane in Spokane, said that next he’s off to Dayton, Ohio, to finish wrapping a water tower there. He adds that his work, which he’s done for 28 years, gives him an interesting view of America.

“It’s the best part of my job,” he said.

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached at [email protected].