With welding torches and wrenches big enough to turn 3-inch-across nuts, the pump house gang dismantled old Lowlift Pump No. 2 on Monday, as they neared the end of a major renovation of the Western Virginia Water Authority’s Crystal Spring pumping station.

In about a week’s time, they’ll have chipped out No. 2’s 9-inch-thick concrete pad, wrestled its 3,000 pound, 9-foot-tall replacement into place and connected the foot-across iron pipes that feed in Crystal Spring’s water.

And with that, they will have finished swapping out the five 56-year-old pumps that kept much of Roanoke supplied with water since the late 1950s, said Mike Altizer, the authority’s project manager.

The work at Crystal Spring is a major element of a $32 million systemwide renovation that is also seeing the authority replace all its water meters. The authority is down to the last couple of hundred of those, said spokeswoman Sarah Baumgardner.

The aim of the investment is to cut energy bills, let customers monitor their water use more closely and ensure that all the water the authority pumps is paid for.

As part of the renovation, the authority is also replacing pumps at Spring Hollow near Dixie Caverns, including the ones that move water from the river to the reservoir as well as the ones that pump treated water from the reservoir to customers across much of Roanoke County.

New pumps are coming to the Delray pumping station in the northern part of Roanoke, the Hollins Station near Plantation Road and the Statesman pumping station off of Orange Avenue in northeast Roanoke.

The new pumps will save the water authority $300,000 in its annual electricity bill. That represents about 1 percent of total expenses for the authority’s water operation.

The two new low lift pumps at Crystal Spring move water from there to the Grandin Court water tanks, which in turn supply most of the southern and southwestern part of the city. Gravity, as water moves down from the tanks to water mains, is what keeps the pressure up in those neighborhoods.

The job of keeping the pressure up in downtown Roanoke falls to the pump house’s three new high lift pumps. They push water from Carvins Cove and Crystal Spring to those customers, and residents of several other neighborhoods west, north and east of downtown.

Altizer said his top job has been to make sure the water keeps flowing as all five pumps are swapped out, and he’s proud that there have been no service interruptions.

“Sometimes, we didn’t have a lot of room to move around. And there was a lot of noise,” he said. “But it’s been a good job.”

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