How the misspellings appeared on Wichita State water tower

So how did Wichita State University temporarily become Wichita Staty Universite?

The water tower on campus near 17th and Oliver displayed a misspelled name for the university late Thursday and early Friday. The error quickly took off on social media, including posts by national outlets like USA Today and SB Nation.

It was part of a city of Wichita project to rehabilitate the entire structure of the water tower with protective layers of paint, said Alan King, the city’s public works and utilities director. King said the project started in February and will wrap up next month.

“The work was not driven so much by putting the logos up, but by the complete rehabilitation of that water tower,” he said. “That was a very small part of the overall work.”

But this part of the project included putting a modern WSU logo on the southwest side of the water tank and a modern WuShock on the northeast side.

King said the city had contracted this part of the work out to American SunCraft, an Ohio-based construction company. Their corporate headquarters, in a suburb of Dayton, did not immediately return a request for comment.

The letters for “Wichita State University” were painted on the side of the water tank using individual templates for each letter. They essentially acted as large stencils.

“It’s not like it’s one big great thing that’s placed on the side,” King said. “It’s letter by letter.”

“You carry them up there and use them to paint inside the letter,” he said.

King said the crew had transposed the ‘Y’ in University and the ‘E’ in State, because they were “the last letter of those two words, one on top of the other.”

“It was strictly an error by the contractor’s crew that did the work late yesterday,” King said.

King said he wasn’t sure when the letters were applied onto the water tank.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if they worked all the way up until dark last night,” he said.

King said the contractor’s supervisor noticed the error the next morning, at around 6 a.m. Friday.

“We became aware of the error early this morning,” King said.

The error was fixed before noon. King said he wasn’t aware of a similarly publicized misspelling in his time at the city.

“There’s always a first for something,” King said.

This story was originally published August 4, 2017 at 4:35 PM with the headline "How the misspellings appeared on Wichita State water tower."