Seattle's New Water System Takes Shape
An massive engineering project aims to transform city life with springs and eventually Lake Washington's deep reserves.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
A Post-Intelligencer reporter was detailed yesterday to visit the works of the Spring Hill Water Company and ascertain the progress of the work under way. It was found that 104 white men are now employed at different points of the work, and the number would be increased to 150 by next Saturday. The base of the work at present is in the Judkins' addition, about one mile south of the gas works, where men are engaged in ditching, laying pipes, building tanks, and running tunnels into the hillsides to control the strata of water along the bluff. The company is building fourteen different sized tanks along their property. The smallest of these is 20,000 gallons; the largest is 300,000 gallons. The sources of supply are springs in the hillsides, developed by tunnels every twenty-five feet. The company has already laid 5,000 feet of pipe and is supplying the Columbia and Puget Sound Railroad and local mills. The company intends to eventually push ahead to Lake Washington, where they will install immense steam pumping works to feed a five-million-gallon reservoir on the highest point between the lake and the Sound.
“The pressure will be so great that water can be served to the top of the highest building on the highest point inside the city limits.”
The infrastructure laid in 1883 by the Spring Hill Water Company was the foundation for modern Seattle's municipal water system. While the city's growth has long since surpassed the 'fourteen tanks' and tunnel-based springs, the ambition to leverage Lake Washington as a water source remains the backbone of the city's utility planning.
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