Giant Soup Can of Hornby Island Puzzle

Information I needed to research to try to solve the problem was:  

• normal soup can dimensions: 6in tall and 2.5in radius
• average adult bike height: 42in
• water needed to put out a house fire: 1 gallon of water puts out 3 square feet of fire
• dimensions of houses in BC: approx 2077 square feet; 20 ft high (2-story); 8 height roof
• conversions between inches, feet, gallons

Information I estimated/used reasoning (from the image):

• approximate height of the water tank: about 2-2.5 times the bike height (went with 2.5)
• approximated square house so approx 46ft side lengths (from 2077 square ft)

I ended up calculating the water tank to be about 126in long (upright cylinder height) and a radius of 52.5in. The volume was 1,091,035.86 cubic inches which was about 4,723.1 gallons. I calculated an average BC house to be 48,946 cubic feet which requires about 16,315 gallons to put out (if the entire house were on fire) so the water tank would definitely not have enough water to put out an entire house that was on fire. If only a portion of the house were on fire (say 1/4) then the water in the water tank could put it out. However, I did not take into account the building material which may affect the amount of water needed as well. 

As an extension to the puzzle, students could calculate how much paint might've been used to paint the entire exposed surface of the water tank. This would require their knowledge on surface area of cylinders and research on how much area a can of paint can cover. The difficulty could be increased by asking how much of each colour paint was used.