PIEDMONT, WEST VIRGINIA, WATER WORKS.

PIEDMONT, WEST VIRGINIA, WATER WORKS.

CATER works were constructed in Piedmont during the fall of 1898. There are but few, if any, special features in the work which need commenting upon, save perhaps a service reservoir. Piedmont, with a population of three thousand, is situated on the Potomac river, 205 miles from the foot of the famous seventeen-mile grade on the Baltimore and Ohio railway. Here the company has erected extensive shops with the corporation water works supply. There are also manufactories which, with the ordinary town requirements, bring the consumption up to 500,000 gallons a day. Piedmont affords an illustration of the folly of limiting the appropriation to au amount which prevents the adoption of the best system of water works. Limited to an expenditure of $86 000, a gravity system from a stream whose dry weather flowamounts to 1,500,000 gallons a day, could not bo considered; although $45,000 w-ould have sufficed to construct the works.

泵站是唯一的选择,ly penditure on which in engineers’ salaries, coal and preciation of machines amounts to three times the interest the additional expenditure that a gravity system would ve necessitated. The plant was designed shortly after W. Dean published the results of his experiments, hich appealed so favorably to the locomotive type of liler. As coal could be delivered at the pumping station r a dollar a ton. the writer considered this a good town i which to experiment with the economy of locomotive lilers. From the effects of many trials, he is forced to nfess that the results obtained do not warrant his repeatg the experiment, especially where the cost of coal is uch greater than at Piedmont, which more often than >t is likely to be the case. The boilers were covered ith asbestos one-inch thick, to reduce loss of heat by diation.