Serving Whitman County since 1877
Serving Whitman County since 1877
The Palouse city council has approved a $10,000 expenditure for a cultural survey in the interest of building a water tower at Greenwood Cemetery.
The vote Jan. 9 allows for the city to pay for the work on city-owned land at the highest point on the south hill. The survey will determine if any historical artifacts or remnants are beneath the surface of where the tower would go. It is part of an application Palouse filed in September for a USDA Rural Development grant.
Kramer’s Funeral Home of Palouse has confirmed there are no burials or plots sold on the land.
The water tower idea comes after the city turned off its pre-1900 reservoir two years ago. The 130,000-gallon tank, on the north hill behind the high school, acted as a backup.
“What we lost was redundancy,” said Mayor Michael Echanove.
With the old reservoir offline, the city now solely uses its newer reservoir, built in 1974, a 500,000 gallon structure next to the original.
Last year, the Palouse city council began to examine what it might take to put in a new reservoir of some kind.
Michelle Bly of TD&H Engineering in Lewiston is Palouse’s project engineer. She was hired in December 2016 after a windstorm damaged the now-closed reservoir.
Bly will confer with consultants Plateau Archaeological Investigations, Pullman, to do the cultural survey.
Water use
If built in Palouse, the tower could hold as much as 300,000 gallons.
Funding has yet to be secured, while the timing may play a role in allowing it to happen.
The city is one payment away from paying off a 20-year loan on well no. 3, which opened in 2001.
If the water tower is built, the payments for the well may shift straight to a loan for the water tower.
“The funding is very timely,” said Echanove. “If we get the funding (from USDA), the stars and the moon are lining up where it’s a very doable project.”
The elevation of the proposed tower would be calculated in regard to the height of the reservoir on the north side.
“This would be placed strategically in order to provide better service and pressure to the south side, where a lot of growth is happening for Palouse,” said Bly.
Reservoirs – towers or otherwise – work together through an electrical system.
“You want the reservoirs to talk to each other,” Bly said.
A cultural survey begins with background research on an area to check for any known archaeological sites, historic properties or settlements. Field work follows, in which a crew will perform sub-surface probing as much as a meter deep to look for items such as stone tools, arrowheads, foundations or wells.
“Any evidence of pre-contact archaeological sites,” said David Harder, archaeologist for Plateau Archaeological Investigations. “Prior to the written record of the area – Native Americans.”
Garth Meyer is a former Whitman County Gazette reporter.
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