Big lava lamp a big headache

SOAP LAKE, Wash. – If lava lamps required this much work of stoned kids in the 1960s, they’d never have become so popular.

A 50-foot-tall lamp that one day is expected to be a tourist attraction arrived in this central Washington community this week in pieces on four flatbed trailers. Putting the pieces together will be “much more complicated” than Brent Blake, the project’s coordinator, thought it would be.

“It’s just unbelievable – endless pieces of structural steel and fiberglass. We need a genius engineer to put this all together again,” Blake told the Wenatchee World.

The lamp is billed as the world’s largest functional lava lamp. The lamp’s pieces – some of which appear to be damaged – include about 30,000 pounds of metal, plastic, fiberglass and lights. For now they’re being stored at a warehouse in nearby Ephrata.

When finished, the lamp should simulate gently undulating globs of glowing lava.

Blake had hoped the lamp could be erected by this spring, but now questions remain about whether it can be finished this year. Thousands of dollars will have to be raised to assemble it.