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Comment by dwighttk | Hacker News Reader

I wonder why they still use wood.

Cost effective and comes with a few benefits such as: natural material which won't taint water, and it has good insulating effects in winter.

There was a Dirty Jobs episode which featured Mike accompanying a water tank crew doing a roof top replacement. They shape the boards of wood at the shop, truck it in, and use manual labor to schlep the boards up to the roof. Old boards come back down the same way. No extremely expensive crane service or metal working necessary. So it is quite cost effective.

And somewhat naturally immune to leaks because the wood swells to fill the gaps.

What do you mean, "still"? The wooden tanks are decades old.

Mike Row built a new one from wood relatively recently on Dirty Jobs. IIRC, only the bands holding it together were metal.

I'm not up on NYC code, since I don't live in the city, but I wonder if it was a rebuild of an existing wooden tank under a "repair in kind" exemption. I have seen shit like that before, such as codes that allow knocking down all but one wall of a building and still calling it a "remodel" (and thus preserving grandfathered code exemptions).

My favorite one is keeping one wall, building three, knocking down the last wall and huraah... still a 'remodel'

Code hacking like that is almost a sport in South Florida.

Literally where I saw it... Wynwood in Miami.

What do you mean, 'What do you mean, "still"'? They are still using wood...

I interpreted "using" in the context of construction methods, since it was attached to the material, not the object like your statement is here. To me, your statement implied that new towers are still being built with wood. It sounds like you meant to ask why wooden towers are still in use.

They were still using wood in 2012, at least https://www.businessinsider.com/rosenwach-wood-water-tanks-i...

See my other comment above[1]. That company is rebuilding existing tanks on existing buildings, not building new tanks. That might sound like hair-splitting, but it is significant in the context of building codes.

I'm not defending the code as written. However, there are a lot of complexities involved in retrofitting newer things to older buildings that are difficult to encapsulate in codes, hence the reason grandfathering provisions tend to be more generous than some people would like.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19442493

They put a new tank on a new building in 2007

http://vanishingnewyork.blogspot.com/2007/09/wooden-water-ta...

"Indeed, new tanks are being built every day, in part because of the current building boom."

(again 2007, but NYT instead of a blog)

https://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/nyregion/thecity/03wate.h...

Well OK then. I thought new construction had moved on, but apparently not.

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