I Was Wrong About the Purple Pipe

Purple Pipe Being Disassembled

In an early post, I speculated that the purple pipe outside our apartment might be part of an old district heating system.

I was wrong.

Here, you can see the pipe being disassembled by Citykran, likely a construction equipment rental company ("Kran" being German for the stork-like cranes that dot the city at construction sites). The end of June being nigh, the 6 month lease is probably up for the construction project on the corner of Gervinusstrasse and Wilmersdorferstrasse, which is a block away from us. And today I saw a big truck carrying sections of purple pipe driving down Marchstrasse towards Ernst Reuter Platz, so I guess the 6 month lease is up for other construction sites too.

Probably the pipe is some piece of construction equipment, but like nothing we've got in the US. There's another one, fully assembled, on Otto Suhr Allee, an alternative route to work that I've been taking lately:

What you can't see because its behind the teddy bear showing his butt to us (again my lack of skill with a cellphone camera) is water pouring out of a pipe that isn't properly connected. So it is likely some way to get water from an outlet where a lot of it comes out to a place on the construction site, like where they make concrete, that needs a lot of water.

Maybe the water is recycled or from one of the rivers and not from the municipal water supply? I know in Mountain View and Palo Alto, the purple pipe on the bay side of 101 carries recycled water from the Palo Alto sewage disposal plant for irrigation purposes. Perhaps they use a purple pipe for the same thing in Berlin?

Doesn't seem like something you could find out by googling it. Maybe I'll get up the nerve to ask one of the construction technicians when I pass the site on Otto Suhr Allee.

Update 6/27/2015: My brother-in-law, who is visiting this weekend, says that the purple pipes are to drain ground water away from building sites when the foundations are put in. Until he retired, he ran a department involved in issuing building permits for the city of Hamburg. So the mystery has been solved.