On a drive along Perryville Road out of Danville, you can see long blue pipes laid out along the road and a water tower being built on a hill on Tuggle Road. These are two water projects currently underway in an effort to bring better water pressure and capacity to the west end of Boyle County.

Ultimately, this access to a more direct source to treated water is expected to increase property values in the west end of the county because people who live farther out of town, and thus farther away from the Danville’s water treatment plant on East Lexington Avenue would have a large volume of treated water closer to them, said Marshall Carrier, utilities director for the city of Danville.

“It’s a benefit for everyone, ultimately,” he said.

The water main project is Perryville Road Phase 2, an $850,000 project facilitated by a rural development loan granted to Hubert Excavation, extending from Caldwell Road to Tuggle Road along Perryville Road, Carrier said. It’s about 16,000 linear feet of 12-inch water main with estimated completion sometime by the end of the summer.

Phase three of the project will see water main extending to the tank project visible from Perryville Road being built on Tuggle Road. The tank itself is a separate undertaking and will consist of a 750,000-gallon storage tank with a booster pump below it.

The tank project is a $2.9 million contract at Tuggle Road and includes the tank, booster pump and water line infrastructure underground. It came out of a Kentucky Infrastructure Authority loan. The people handling the steel work for the tank project have been from Louisville company Caldwell Tanks, and that is who also is erecting the tank. Another contractor on the water towner is Montgomery Brothers Contracting. The tank will look similar to the one on Fourth Street in Danville once finished, Carrier said.

Currently the phase two water main project is about halfway done, and the tank project is about 25% done.

Carrier said the need for extending water main and building the tower is essentially to bring increased capacity and water pressures to people along Perryville Road, into Perryville and beyond, into the west end of Boyle County.

“So we’re working hard to facilitate improvements to those folks on the western side of the county, if that makes sense, only because you’re getting further and further away from our water distribution plant,” Carrier said.

It’s estimated that the water tank will be complete in January.

As far as phase three of the water main project connecting to the tank, since the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet is currently in the process of replacing the bridge over Chaplin River, the water line will traverse across the bridge once it’s complete, Carrier said.

Phase three is just in the preliminary design stage right now, and it takes a while to get through design and construction, he said. It will be an approximately $2 million undertaking, or more, and will include about 18,000 feet of 12-inch water main as planned at this point. Phase one was completed several years ago, connecting from the existing water main on the bypass in Danville and going down Perryville Road to Caldwell Road.

By eventually being able to pump water into the tank and keeping it stored instead of pumping it all the way from Danville’s water plant, water will be able to come from the plant into the tank.

“So it can help two-fold — like, the folks that are already in close proximity can get increased pressures, which is never a bad thing, necessarily, and then folks further away that need good, clean water that’s been treated at the water plant can now get more water supply because we have increased pressures along with the system,” Carrier said.