If you were to peek behind the curtain of the Tennessee Aquarium’s vibrant exhibits, you’d find an intricate network keeping everything flowing smoothly.
Seldom-noticed but critically important, the Aquarium’s plumbing – much like the cardiovascular system of a living organism – ensures water circulates to where it’s needed most, from the restrooms and drinking fountains to the life support systems that ensure the health and wellbeing of more than 13,000 animals.
For World Plumbing Day, we’re taking a closer look at this invisible infrastructure and the crucial role it plays in both guest experience and the health of the Aquarium’s residents.
Pipes crisscross the River Journey building's pump room, connecting to water pumps and filtration systems.
A big-pipe dream
The Aquarium’s life support systems move water around on an enormous scale. Every day, 600 pumps circulate about 25.2 million gallons through aquatic exhibits in the River and Ocean Journey buildings. That’s enough water to fill about 38 Olympic-size swimming pools.
Every minute, pipes push 17,500 gallons around the Aquarium at flow rates more than 8,000 times higher than those of an average household shower.
Staggering as that number is, it doesn’t even include water flowing through the Aquarium’s restrooms, sinks, heating, cooling or sprinkler systems. Wherever it’s headed, it takes a lot of pipes to move that much water around. The River Journey building alone had a sprawling 14.2-miles laid during its construction.
Luckily, the Aquarium doesn’t use up and replace all its water each day. Instead, most if it is being moved around and reused. Most exhibits are designed to circulate their entire volume of water through a filtration system once each hour to help keep aquatic residents healthy.
“It’s important to us that we manage our water well,” says Chief Husbandry and Exhibit Officer Thom Demas. “Wherever possible, we try to mitigate how much water we throw away and replace.
“Not using water as though it were endless is important for us as good stewards of our environment, which is the very thing we are here to convey to people.”
Facilities Maintenance Lead and Master Plumber Les Lawrence
A different sort of plumber, different kind of pipes
Aquarium plumbing is a little different from conventional plumbing. Building and maintaining such a vast infrastructure requires a team of specialists with skills and experience beyond those of most residential or commercial plumbers.
“We’re taking care of life,” says Facilities Maintenance Lead and Master Plumber Les Lawrence. “Your typical plumbers have never had to experience that.”
From dialing in optimal flow rates for filtration systems to maintaining systems that inject ozone into the water, there’s a whole host of challenges unique to the Aquarium’s plumbing network.
Even the pipes are unusual because metal pipes can leech toxins into the water system, Lawrence says.
“We have big, 20-inch fiberglass piping,” he explains. “You don’t see that anywhere, and it’s because for any exhibits with fish, we can’t have any metal touching the exhibit water.”
Saltwater presents another challenge because it is highly corrosive. To combat the inevitable decay – especially for metal equipment – the Aquarium’s plumbers work with specially designed pumps.
“The whole pump – the impeller included – is made entirely of fiberglass,” Lawrence says. “Unless you work at a chemical plant or someplace that uses saltwater, you probably won’t ever see one.”
Aquarium plumbers work alongside aquarists to add plumbing systems to the Ridges to Rivers gallery during its construction.
An ongoing challenge
While its role in the health of the Aquarium’s residents is a top priority, smoothly functioning plumbing is also critical to the guest experience.
“When someone visits the restroom, you don’t want to have an out-of-order sign,” Lawrence explains. “The water has to be warm when they wash their hands, with everything flushing and draining and no smells. That’s one of our top priorities.”
Functional plumbing is one aspect of the Aquarium’s infrastructure that fades into the background when everything goes right but becomes impossible to ignore when something goes wrong.
Fortunately, a lot of preparation and some professional networking has helped Lawrence prepare for the times when disaster strikes.
Just a few years ago, a 12-inch pipe in the basement of the Ocean Journey building broke, partially flooding the space.
“We had a valve malfunction, and we pumped about 1200 gallons in about a second,” he recalls. “It blew the fitting completely off a 25-foot stick of pipe that weighed who knows how much.”
The pipe couldn’t stay out of service for long, so Lawrence sought a quick resolution by relying on vendor relationships he’d built from attending professional conferences and trade shows nationwide.
“I can pick up the phone and say, ‘I need this part now,’” he says. “Within 10 minutes, they’ve found one in Atlanta and have a carrier bringing it to us in three hours instead of having to get it mailed.”
The biggest challenges are often new exhibits, but Lawrence says he also finds those to be the most rewarding.
While the Aquarium contracts electrical work or other elements of exhibit design to outside companies, the life support systems are built entirely in-house due to the specialized nature of the work.
“We do a lot of the engineering ourselves,” Lawrence says. “I like the freedom we’re given here to design stuff, and I just finished up some school for an engineering degree because that’s my passion.”
Plumbing new exhibits in-house has led to innovative successes like the Ridges to Rivers Gallery’s large stream exhibit. Thanks to months of painstaking experimentation and iteration in its design, this “true to wild” habitat so closely mimics a real-world stream that it generated a first-of-its-kind spawning frenzy of native fishes last year.
Successful as those innovations have been, the plumbing system in the River Journey and Ocean Journey buildings is usually most successful in ways that visitors and staff never notice. Whether it’s appreciated consciously or not, that behind-the-scenes engineering is the lifeline that keeps the Aquarium and its residents thriving.
