Was dropping somebody off at SeaTac airport today, and on my way out I double took. This building that I had never noticed before seemed to have water cascading down inside of it. I guessed what it was, but I was so weirded out by the sudden appearance of a dynamic new element in a facility I had been to many times, I had to make another loop around just to get video, so I could convince myself a water main hadn't broken.
It had not, and as I suspected, it turns out this is a cooling tower, just like the ones you see next to nuclear power plants. I knew they were used for less exotic purposes, but I had never seen one just exposed to the public like this. Normally, these are part of building HVAC systems and the like, and they appear as anonymous, squat boxes on top of buildings with louvers on the side; you can't see any of the action.
As it turns out, the reason this one is so visible is... because they wanted it to be.
With a significant quantity of falling water as part of the cooling process, there is an inherent opportunity to create a dramatic water feature. The prime view of the site is from Deplane Drive as one leaves the terminal. Given this, Tower 1 is orientated with its large (34-feet wide by 20-feet high) air-intake opening facing west in order to give the passerby the most direct view of the falling water inside.
Since flow of the system is variable from zero to one hundred percent on any given day, a passerby may see either the stillness of the concrete form alone, or the motion and sound of sixteen cubic feet per second of raining and cascading water.
The airport has a gigantic cooling system, not just for the terminals and support buildings, but the aircraft themselves, through a clever system where chilled water is piped out to the tarmac and used to condition the air inside aircraft that are boarding and can't yet spin up their engines. This facility dissipates the heat from cooling all that working fluid, and they opted to position it as a public fountain, albeit in a pretty awkward location. Neat!
The college where I did my undergrad (New Mexico Tech) used to have a waterfall on the outside of the cooling plant as an aesthetic feature. Unfortunately it hasn't worked for many years, the story I heard is that there were always maintenance issues with the basin leaking and so when they replaced the main evaporative coolers there was little interest in keeping it plumbed in. Unfortunately that left the small cooling plant building with a rather ignominious fate; it still has the very visible waterfall and basin but they have been left to accumulate trash. I've always thought if I was university president I would make a big stink to try to get it fixed.
I couldn't find a photo, in my archives or online, but the current campus map (in "uncanny valley" style) lovingly depicts it, complete with the walls of the feature still painted blue. I believe this plant provides chilled water for most buildings in the central campus area.
