IT WILL GET A NEW (ORANGE) PAINT JOB
Platte City’s orange water tower will stay orange into the future.
Platte City’s iconic orange water tower at 1500 Branch Street (Hwy. 92 across from the high school) will be cleaned and repainted in its current orange with black “Welcome to Platte City” lettering.
The contractor, American Suncraft, began on-site mobilization on Aug. 28.
City officials say the project consists of draining the tower, removing interior and exterior paint down to bare metal and repainting the entire tank.
Water tank exterior coatings have an expected life span of 25 to 30 years. The last time the tank exterior was repainted was 1993, although that process was an overcoat only and did not take the tank down to bare metal, according to DJ Gehrt, former city administrator/now transition assistant for the city.
In the 1990s, repainting of the tower caused some controversy in the community for a time. Originally, city officials had considered a plan to change the orange color, but after getting some pushback from the community the city opted to stick with orange for the repainting project at that time. There was no public discussion of any color change this time around.
The interior of the tank is cleaned with paint touch up on a regular basis with the last interior cleaning/touch up occurring in 2021.
The most visible part of this cleaning and painting project will be the installation of a containment drape to shroud the entire tower. The containment drape allows the contractor to contain and capture the abrasives used to remove the paint as well as all of the removed paint particles.
The drape will remain in place during both the cleaning and painting phases to contain and recover removal particles and to prevent paint overspray.
The orange tower is expected to be out of service for 45-60 days.
Gehrt said the city has sufficient operating pressure from its supply line from the City of Kansas City and sufficient water storage in its 1.6 million gallon water standpipe east of I-29 to minimize the impact on the city water supply system while the 250,000 gallon orange tank is out of service.
