Like the fisherman who always has a great tale about the big one that got away, many cleaners can relate stories about difficult trenchless jobs that tapped their problem-solving creativity. But unlike fish tales, these stories aren’t embellished. The only imagination at play was the ingenuity used to surmount a challenge. Here are a few difficult trenchless projects that cleaners nonetheless reeled in hook, line and sinker.
“One of the toughest jobs we’ve ever done was a fairly large-scale sanitary sewer pipe-bursting project on the island of Nantucket, Mass.,” explains Matt Timberlake, vice president of Ted Berry Co. Inc. in Livermore, Maine. “The majority of the town is under historic protection, even the actual cobbles in the cobblestone streets. So leaving any type of footprint whatsoever held significant ramifications.
“We had to drive four hours, then ferry our equipment 17 miles over the Atlantic Ocean to the island. The job consisted of about 5,500 feet of static bursting of sanitary lines six to 10 inches in diameter. The pipes were about 100 to 125 years old, almost all made out of terra cotta.
“Unfortunately for us, the repairs were scattered throughout the whole town. On a typical sewer replacement job, you start at one end of a street and work 1,000 feet to the other end. But this project consisted of 22 areas, and 25 different bursts. Every street we did, we had to attack like it was a whole new job.
“We were working for a contractor who had only heard about pipe bursting before this project. So we had to train the contractor about our needs, which added another level of complexity. Also, the island is mostly sand. That’s good and bad for pipe bursting. The good thing is the bursting is usually done at a relatively low tonnage. The bad thing is you run into issues with shoring static machines. So we did a lot with I-beams and driving piles to shore the machines.
“Another big challenge was utilities, which were either unmarked or were very close to sewer lines. Every morning, we weren’t 100 percent sure what we’d find under the ground. On one of the very first streets we did, we found water line services touching the sanitary sewer line.
“We started the job on Dec. 1, and it took about three months. We never broke a utility while pipe bursting. There were a couple of applications where the water mains ran directly parallel to the sewer mains – only four inches apart in one area.
“The key to success with a project like this is anticipating problems. If you anticipate some things and really do your homework, and go at them from a team approach, the challenges are manageable. The unmanageable challenges are the ones you haven’t anticipated and have no way of dealing with.”
“One of our toughest trenchless jobs was at the Arkansas state capitol in Little Rock,” says Jason Mathey, a fabrication manager for LMK Enterprises Inc. in Ottawa, Ill. “We had to line a 6-inch roof drain that went from the roof down four stories into the basement. There were three 90-degree bends and two reinstatements for lateral lines coming into the drain pipe.
“On a scale of one to 10, this project was an eight or a nine. It was straight down, so we had to deal with gravity. Plus, the building’s interior walls are made of marble, and they were just redone as part of a renovation project. So they didn’t want to tear them up.
“To get up to the roof, we had to use scaffolding. We used a crane for one day to get our equipment up onto the roof. The building’s maintenance crew had already located where the pipeline came into the basement. They cut the pipeline and gave us a nice gap where we could retrieve the liner.
“In the trailer, we wetted-out about 70 feet of a cured-in-place pipe system that uses a hot-air cure, epoxy-resin liner. It was pretty heavy. We got it all folded up and carried it up the scaffolding to the roof. We loaded it into the tank, and then I went back down the scaffolding and into the basement.
“When the liner protruded from the pipe, I cut it off. I had an end cone that I made at the shop with a ball valve, so we could exhaust the heat in the liner into the basement. We talked back and forth by radio to get the liner pressure-adjusted until we could put hot air into it.
“The main portion of the job took one day. It was a high-risk job, for sure, because if something had happened, it would have been a disaster. But later on, an engineer from the capitol personally called me and said they had some serious rain during a hurricane, and not a drop of water leaked. So whatever the problem was, we had it cured – literally and figuratively.”
“We were doing a job in a high-end gated community in Honolulu,” recalls Ken Davis, a field supervisor for Allens Plumbing in Kahului, Maui in Hawaii. “Our task was to replace a 6-inch clay sewer line about six or seven feet down.
“The obstacle was that the line was down in a ravine on a slight grade, and there was a ditch, or trench, for water runoff onto the side. You couldn’t drive a vehicle down there, so we had to get a crane to lift a 7,000-pound excavator down there in order to do some trenching and expose the pipe.
“We ended up replacing the sewer line by means of pipe bursting. We did some spot repairs, but we found root intrusions every 10 feet at the connections. So rather than dig up the old line, we replaced it with new polyethylene pipe. It was a three- to four-day job because it rained quite a bit. We had to fly a crew in from Maui. It was a tough job, but it worked out in the end.”
