Bucket brigade to the rescue!

We love to do conventional things but always in very unconventional ways. A customer recently approached us to design a kid’s splash park. They want the park to tell a wonderful story from their city’s past. A hundred years ago, when a fire threatened to burn down the entire town the citizens formed a bucket brigade and managed to save many buildings by working together. The bucket theme was obvious for the project and we were provided with examples of some commercially available splash park equipment. While it was functional and well built it simply didn’t tell their story. It needed context. A little research netted lots of examples of some wonderful buckets from the period. It was a simple matter to use this reference material to design our buckets. The big challenge was how we would suspend an oversized bucket to dump the water as it needed to be high off the ground. This structure couldn’t distract from the story. We considered many ideas before we found the perfect one. A similarly scaled hand pump which would have been around in that era would do perfectly. It was the ideal solution and provided a strong vertical element to our display. At twenty-four feet tall this will be a very fun challenge to build!

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