Photo: Small town and bright lights, a community celebration Oct. 4 in Three Hills, welcomed the launch of a new water town lighting system.  In his last official function as mayor, Ray Wildemann applauded those who made the project possible, describing the water tower as “a cornerstone of our community.”  Rural Alberta Report/David Nadeau

Small town and bright lights, a community celebration Oct. 4 in Three Hills, welcomed the launch of a new water town lighting system.  In his last official function as mayor, Ray Wildemann applauded those who made the project possible, describing the water tower as “a cornerstone of our community.”  Rural Alberta Report/David Nadeau

Byrne Lammle of Three Hills is closer to retirement than he is to his carefree teen days that often saw him doing the forbidden:  climbing the town’s 120-foot water tower.

But for the last three weeks, now a seasoned master electrician clad in a hefty safety harness, Lammle repeated his teenage exploit daily, this time to install and supervise what might prove to be the Chamber of Commerce’s biggest-ever project:  re-lighting the 75-year-old water tower with leading edge digital lights.

For years, the facility, now decommissioned and serving as a vital communications tower, was billed as the province’s tallest Christmas tree.

Gone to their destiny is a pickup truck full of old lighting equipment, endless strings of Christmas tree lights.  No one, said Lammle, will miss their susceptibility to weather and failure.

At $90,000, the Three Hills and District Chamber of Commerce project welcomed funding from dozens of large and small contributors and hundreds of volunteer hours.

But on Oct. 4 as darkness fell, no one was thinking about work or money because organizers turned a light-the-tower event into a community party, complete with a performance by Dance Celebration, free refreshments, an open Aquatic Center, fuzzy visitors from Kirk’s alpaca farm and face painting.

Chamber President Danielle Roberts was quick to give credit where credit is due.  “We can’t say enough about how much Byrne Lammle has meant to the project.  In addition to being a gold level sponsor, as project manager he dealt with suppliers and designed how the lighting would look.  His volunteer team helped him remove the old lights and put up the new lights.  This project would not have been successful without Byrne Lammle said that when every light is on, the new system’s power consumption is equivalent to that of a hair dryer.”

“Every light on” includes 20 powerful lights on tower legs to color the tank, 12 light ropes on the tank sides and four floodlights to illuminate the words THREE HILLS.

“What’s really interesting,” said Lammle, “is that the lights can be color-programmed to salute dozens of special days throughout the year, such as Christmas, Remembrance Day, Easter, Halloween, etc.”