Albertans hope to break record with Popsicle stick structure

Members of a Hutterite colony in southern Alberta have potentially built the world’s tallest structure made of Popsicle sticks.

Students at Miami Hutterite Colony School southeast of Lethbridge carefully constructed the tower on Friday, which they say measured 88.9 feet tall.

“About four years ago, we decided to do a research project on all the different towers throughout the world,” explained Levi Romeril, a teacher at the school.

“I let the students pick what they wanted to do, and one of my students said we should build a model of different structures, and I thought Popsicle sticks would be a fun thing [to use], and they each built three-to-four-foot replicas.”

After that, Romeril says another student approached him asking what the world record was for the tallest Popsicle stick structure.

“I looked into it and, at the time, I think it was a kid from Ohio and his tower was like 21 feet, and I thought that was beatable.”

The next year, Romeril and his students began the process of creating a Popsicle stick tower, which set the Guinness World Record at 41.1 feet.

The school held the record for about six months before a man in Brazil surpassed it with his tower, which was 77.9 feet.

“That just fuelled my fire, and I told the students that we’re taking that back,” Romeril said. “We stuck with our same design and started building again.”

Romeril and five students began gluing around 40,000 Popsicle sticks together.

Their goal was to build a tower that was 125 feet high – taller than the Lethbridge Water Tower.

“On Friday evening, we got a lift from a neighbouring colony and started to assemble the tower,” he said.

“We were at 88.9 feet high, and the breeze started to pick up just enough to make the tower start to move on us, so we set the record there.”

Romeril says there were lessons to be learned along the way.

“There were times we wanted to give up, we had some stumbling blocks… I actually fell off a ladder and fell onto one of the towers a week before, so we had to totally rebuild this thing, but we didn’t give up. We pursued it, we pushed hard and we worked together.

“That was the biggest thing – there was no way someone could stand this on their own, it takes a group of people.”

Romeril is in the process of submitting the attempt to Guinness, and is expecting to hear back from them in about three months with the results.