BETHEL — This Western Maine community, which holds two world records for building the tallest snowman and snow-woman, will attempt another such engineering marvel for the annual winter festival.
But instead of building snow people, like the 113-foot snowman completed in 1999, or 2008’s 122-foot snow-woman, they plan to build a 140- to 149-foot tower of ice.
Envisioned as the centerpiece for Winterfest, which is from Jan. 22 through 30, the tower will be in the same Bethel Station venue across from the Bethel Area Chamber of Commerce.
“What we’re going to do is use water to make ice, a big ice mountain,” project engineer Jim Sysko of Newry said on Friday afternoon. “They’re calling it an Ice Mountain, but I’m thinking it’s going to be more like an ice tower, rather tall and thin.”
He said the tower may be 50 feet in diameter at its base. It will be created by running town water through different lengths of 1-inch pipe clustered in a hexagonal shape while temperatures are below freezing, he said.
“We’re shooting for 140 feet,” he said. “We’ve got to go no more than 149, according to the Federal Aviation Administration, because after that, we’ll have to put a red light on top of it because of the airport approach.”
The ice tower site isn’t directly aligned with Bethel Regional Airport’s nearby runway, but it is close enough to warrant a signal beacon should they hit 150 feet.
“If for some reason it does get up to 150, we’ll have a climber go up and put a red light on it, but I have no idea whether we’ll actually get that high or not,” Sysko said. “We’ll do the best we can.”
It won’t be the first ice tower that Sysko has built, but it will be the tallest.
About 12 years ago at his small hydro plant, he made an ice tower that was about 60 feet tall.
“I just sprayed water on a tree — covered the tree completely — until you didn’t even know there was a tree there, so it works if you’ve got cold enough weather,” Sysko said. “But that’s not even half of what we’re trying to do this time.”
For the Winterfest ice tower, they will use seven braced 1-inch pipes, which won’t support the tower, but rather provide a way to get water high using water from the town system that flows at 90 pounds of pressure per square inch.
“At 90 pounds per square inch, we should be able to get almost to 200 feet high if we wanted to,” Sysko said.
“We’re not going to go that high, obviously, but it will be pretty comfortable getting water up to the 140-foot mark with that much pressure.”
Each pipe is 20 feet longer than the next one, so they will start out at 20 feet, and then go to 40, 60, 80, 100, 120 and 140, which is the center pipe. There will be welded bands holding them together and seven valves at the bottom.
The plan is to use the first valve for the first 20 feet and make a base, and then when that’s formed, they’ll pump water out the 40-foot-tall pipe, and so on.
“We’ll be able to control it all from the bottom and if that works out, we’ll go to 60,” Sysko said.
“It’s going to be a progressive thing. We’re not going to start out with water coming out at 140 feet,” he said. “We have to build a base first to make it stable. But we’re not sure, because it’s all up to Mother Nature.”
“If it’s really cold like it was last night, I think we can make a lot of ice, but if it’s just marginal, like 25 to 30 degrees, we’re not going to make much ice at all,” he said.
“We need cold weather — a prolonged period of cold weather — to make a really good, big tower.”
Rather than donate an estimated 100,000 cubic feet of water for the project, Bethel Water District trustees unanimously voted on Thursday night to charge the chamber $2,000 to cover treatment and electricity costs to pump the water from the district’s reservoir.
When asked if it would be easier and less pricey to pump water into a tanker truck from the nearby Androscoggin River and truck it in, a trustee said that would be more costly and require special permitting from the Maine Department of Environmental Protection.
To see examples of manmade ice towers, Sysko advised visiting the website of the Alaskan Alpine Club, which provides instructions for building ice towers and photographs.
“They’ve made them all over the world, but it’s just new to us,” he said.
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