New water tower rises in Antigo

ANTIGO — Thursday, some Antigo residents witnessed the a new era in the city.

At least the start of it.

Thursday afternoon, the new water tower near North Elementary School assumed its eventual form when a previously-grounded holding tank was erected onto the tower’s base, bringing it level with the city’s aging white tower in the Antigo skyline.

Public Works Department Head Charley Brinkmeier said work on the new water tower, which began in early Fall of 2023, should be completed by year’s end.

“We still have underground work to do — we still have to tie that water tower into the existing pipework. Then we also have to obviously paint it, put a beacon up on top. There’s some antennas that have to go up on top as well,” Brinkmeier said.

“But when it went up last week, there were a fair amount of people that were looking at it, watching it being constructed, so I think there’s interest out there. But between the water plant and the wastewater plant, those are two facilities that are forgotten about. As long as you turn your faucet on and you can flush your toilet, people don’t care. So it’s infrastructure that’s there and is obviously very important, but people just don’t think about it.”

Brinkmeier said that compared to the old tower, the new one can hold significantly more water with which to pressurize the public’s water supply system.

“It does build us some extra capacity, because the old one was 150,000 gallons, and this one is going to be 200,000. This one will be 200,000, the industrial tower, the blue one, that’s 200,000 gallons. And we have 500,000 gallons of reserve underground. So we do have a little bit more capacity,” he said.

The North Elementary School area’s original water tower, which was built in 1930, will likely be decommissioned as soon as its replacement becomes operational.

“There will be a little time there where we’ll actually have three water towers in place — we’ll have the blue one up on the north end and we’ll have these two on-site,” Brinkmeier said.

The deteriorating condition of the old tower is what led to the decision to replace it.

“It was just a safety issue between the concrete and some of the steel,” she added. “It was just getting to the point where it was going to be a safety issue pretty quick. Because of the style of that tower being a girder and truss, the bolts, they weren’t rusting through, but they were getting rusty, so it was a matter of material life, strength of materials-type stuff.”

The new water tower project, which has been slowed most of all by shipment delays, is being paid for both by a $1 million grant from the DNR and a water utility rate increase. Antigo raised rates by an average of 19.26% to generate $353,206 to fund the project.

Brinkmeier suggested similar projects are needed throughout the country.

“The infrastructure across the United States is in dire need — it’s not just us, it’s all over,” he said. “A lot of this stuff was put in back in the 30s and the 40s. Obviously, it’s been maintained, but the longevity of it is kind of in rough shape. Everything has an end of life, and I think some of this stuff is reaching the end of life.”