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Marcos Zotes projected an eyeball on the bottom of a water tower in Brooklyn. It’s watching you ominously, like a long-legged alien striding over a conquered Earth.
Flickr Set -via Nerdcore
Photo: James Young
For the last ten months, James Young has assembled a collection of photographs of water towers in Ireland. BLDGBLOG has more:
Many of the structures are militaristic and even explicitly fortress-like. They are prisons for water. Others could be mistaken for ornamental menhirs, functionless and inexplicable totems standing patiently in the fog and rain.
A hippopotamus in Alkmaar, South Africa was desperate for a dip to escape the heat, and climbed over ten foot walls to bathe in a water tower! Once in, he couldn’t get out on his own. A farm worker spotted him -or rather, spotted two big nostrils poking out of the water.
Equipped with a hydraulic crane and a cage, hippo hunter Chris Hobkirk and his team from the Mpumalanga Tourism and Parks Association set to work. In a four-hour operation, they drained the tank and used poles to gently nudge the hippo into the 3m-long (10ft) steel cage before winching it to safety.
Mr Hobkirk – who has rescued more than 180 stranded hippos in the past six years – said it was a tricky procedure but he was glad with the outcome.
‘Maybe we got lucky with this one. In the past, I have removed hippos from small dams. In those cases, the water levels have always been much lower so this was different.’
