The matchup for Super Bowl LIX is set, with the defending champs, the Kansas City Chiefs, taking on the Philadelphia Eagles. The internet is less than impressed, and we share the same frustration. Maybe it’s 2023 déjà vu or maybe we’re just tired of Patrick Mahomes, but this year’s Big Game seems to be low on novelty.
While this year’s Super Bowl may be boring, Portland Water certainly isn’t! So while you’re yawning through the big game, you can wow your friends with these not-at-all-boring facts about Portland Water.
One: Our oldest pipe is older than (professional) football
According to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, 1892 was the first year someone was paid to play football. That makes professional football 133 years old.
Sure, that sounds impressive, but we’ve got something even older and cooler: a 144-year-old cast-iron pipe, installed in 1881, that still serves water to a small area of Northwest Portland. Stretching less than the length of a single football field, this small but mighty pipe has outlasted all its neighbors.
Of course, we don’t have many pipes that old left in our water system. Over one-quarter of our pipes were installed before the Philadelphia Eagles were established in 1933, but the average age of our pipes is around 70 years old. That might not pre-date football, but it does beat out the Super Bowl itself, which is only LIX years old. (That’s 59 for those who slept through the Roman numerals unit.)
Two: We install over 83 football fields’ worth of new pipe each year
Remember when we said our pipes have an average age of around 70 years? Well, even if some pipes can hold on for 144 years and counting, they don’t last forever.
Around 450 miles of our older water mains (pipes) will reach the ends of their useful lives over the next 50 years. When pipes reach the ends of their useful lives, they begin to leak or break more often.
Because so many of our pipes are aging, our crews install enough new water main each year to stretch across more than 83 football fields (that’s about 30,000 feet)! In their busiest year yet (July 2023 to June 2024), our crews installed a record-setting 90 football fields’ worth of new water mains (32,644 feet).
Replacing water mains is just one way we maintain our complicated water system—which is made up of over 33,000 football fields’ worth of pipes (that’s 2,250 miles). Do that many football fields even exist?
Three: Our largest pipe could fit the tallest football player of all time—with room to spare
Thousands of miles of pipe form the backbone of our water system, delivering water from our sources in the Bull Run Watershed and Columbia South Shore Well Field to taps around town.
Water pipes come in a variety of sizes, all the way down to pipes that are only half an inch wide. Our biggest pipe lies in an underground vault where multiple conduits meet. At 7.5 feet wide, its massive size helps us manage the flow of water between the intersecting pipes.
That would’ve been plenty of room for 7'0" Richard Sligh, the tallest American professional football player of all time. It’s also enough space to stack 14 footballs on top of each other or line up 8 footballs tip to tip.
Our largest buried pipe is a 5.5-foot-wide, 10-mile conduit that carries water between our two treatment facilities. While that may not be big enough to accommodate the tallest players, we’re confident that’s enough room for 5'8" Eagles player Britain Covey (the shortest player for either Super Bowl–bound team)—if he doesn’t mind slouching.
Four: We’ve flushed enough debris from our pipes to match the weight of all the starting offensive linemen in the NFL
In unfiltered water systems like Portland’s, sediment and other organic materials gather at the bottom of water mains. The controlled release of water through hydrants—a practice called flushing—gets the sediment out and brings fresh water in. We’re working to flush our entire water system before our new filtration facility comes online in September 2027.
As of the end of 2024, we’ve already flushed 17,600 football fields’ (1,200 miles) worth of pipes!
All that flushing has removed around 50,000 pounds of debris from our system so far—which roughly equals the combined weight of all 32 NFL teams’ starting offensive lines! (If you’re thinking that doesn’t sound that impressive, keep in mind those beefy boys weigh an average of 315 pounds each.)
If you’re still not impressed, consider this: That’s also equal to the weight of over 57,000 footballs.
Five: Water has a support bench more than 600 employees deep with over a hundred unique roles
While the players may be the stars of the Big Game, their success depends on dozens of coaches, trainers, equipment managers, medical professionals, and other support staff. Portland Water is no different. And we might biased, but some of our jobs are WAY cooler.
While Portland’s high-quality H2O is the star of the show, it doesn’t get to your tap by magic. Remember the 33,000 football fields’ worth of pipes? Well, those are just one part of a complex water system that employees actively operate, maintain, and improve every day, all year long.
You might guess that we have engineers, customer service specialists, water treatment operators, and maintenance workers. But did you know we also have fish biologists, arborists, GIS mapping experts, climate scientists, industrial painters (yes, that’s a thing), carpenters, and instrument technicians? And that’s just a small sampling! (You can step into the “offices” of some of these amazing experts with these videos.)
In total, more than 600 employees work over 1 million combined hours each year to deliver high-quality water to your taps. We think that beats the Super Bowl any day.