Roof and walls were torn off the city pump station on May 25. — Photo by Clinton Bailey
By Matt Ward —
Tornado damage to the Goehmann Lane pump station on Memorial Day, May 25, temporarily knocked one of Fredericksburg’s main water sources offline, but City of Fredericksburg officials have brought the facility back online.
“We’re fully operational, but we still have a little bit of work to do on reconstructing the building,” Clinton Bailey, city director of public works and utilities, said. “We’ve run diagnostics on the electric motors and all the controls and we’ve had to make some repairs there, but we’ve now verified that it’s 100 percent operational at this point.”
The pump station’s roof and a structural wall were ripped off the building by the tornado, classified F1 by the National Weather Service. The tornado touched down for about two miles at speeds between 85-90 miles per hour.
Winds also downed nearby power lines and a transformer bank, though power has been fully restored to the site. Neither the existing nor the under construction storage tanks located at the pump station site were damaged, Bailey said.
“Realistically speaking, this is the best possible outcome considering the circumstances because it could have wiped out everything,” Bailey said. “It could have been a situation where we could have been waiting for a long time (to get the station operational) or we would have been paying dearly to get it up and running.”
Costs to completely repair the damage will depend on whether the pump station would be simply renovated or completely reconstructed, according to Bailey.
Water restrictions
City officials had requested last week that residents and local businesses refrain from non-essential water use for the time being until full service was restored at the Goehmann Lane pump station to keep city water reserves up.
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