OT: Big Pumps

http://deseretnews.com/misc/gsl/110001743.htm

An excerpt:

<<Tall as houses, with gear boxes the size of Volkswagens, the three 72.6-ton engines of the West Desert Pumping Project have sat mothballed and silent inside a darkened pump station for 10 years now.

They wait for the day a rampaging Great Salt Lake again threatens to engulf millions of dollars worth of farmland, roads, railroads, industries and subdivisions, as it did from 1983 to 1987 when its waters rose to nearly 4,212 feet above sea level.

If and when the state decides to use the $60 million pumping system again, it will take six to eight weeks to get the machinery ready. Then a gas pipeline will be turned on 37 miles away, and the pump station on the west shore of the lake will roar with the noise of 11,500 horsepower.

As they did from April 10, 1987, to June 30, 1989, the three V-16, turbocharged, slow-speed Ingersoll-Rand engines will power the blades inside three 50-foot-long, 10- to 12-foot-wide pumps made of aluminum-bronze. (In 1986, it took nearly all of the world's supply of the alloy to build them.)

The pumps will lift the lake's water more than 20 feet from a canal at a rate of 1.5 million gallons per minute and send it through another canal to a 500-square-mile evaporation basin four miles away in the West Desert.>> Received on Wed Mar 31 18:50:00 2004