A team of divers will descend into Powell’s eastern water tower later this year to conduct a cleaning and inspection.

At a meeting last week, the city council approved a $3,500 contract with a Colorado-based firm, Inland Potable Services, to perform the routine maintenance; the company took care of the city’s western tower last summer.

The Environmental Protection Agency requires water storage facilities to be cleaned and inspected every two to five years, and City Water Superintendent Ty McConnell told the council last July that the standard operating procedure is to send in divers. All of their equipment is disinfected before they enter the water.

Back in 2021, the city signed a $2,600 contract with a firm that planned to have the western tower emptied before they cleaned it. However, the council switched gears and hired Inland last year, after McConnell reported that it had been difficult to schedule the other crew and that emptying the tower had drawbacks.

Dropping the water levels and temporarily switching the city over to one tower involves “a lot of logistics and kind of juggling,” McConnell said last year, and it would have temporarily resulted in some low water pressures on the west side of town.

Hiring divers is “a little bit more money,” he told the council at the July 1 meeting, “but I think it’s done in a better way.”

Others apparently feel the same way, as McConnell said “everybody” has been using divers to avoid having to take their elevated tanks out of service. He said Inland Potable Services has also been used by Lovell, Byron, Cody, Northwest Rural Water District and the Shoshone Municipal Pipeline.

Inland’s bill for the eastern tower is $350 more than last year’s work on the western one, largely because the tower by Homesteader Park is a bit taller, McConnell said.

The two towers serve residents and businesses on the eastern and western sides of Division Street, respectively.

The city’s water system also includes a large, partially underground tank off West North Street, which a separate team of divers inspected and cleaned last year at a cost of $4,236.

Inland’s upcoming cleaning of the eastern tower has not yet been scheduled.