Pipe Bursting in Conneaut

What runs under Conneaut's older streets

Conneaut is the easternmost city on Ohio's Lake Erie shore, and its housing tells the story of the harbor and the railroads. The blocks around Main Street, State Street and the old Nickel Plate yards were built between the 1890s and the 1920s, and the laterals under those homes are almost always vitrified clay laid in short jointed lengths. Each joint is a place where roots can enter and where decades of frost can nudge the pipe out of line.

The postwar neighborhoods toward Lake Road and the Conneaut Township Park side of town were built from the late 1940s into the 1960s. That window is exactly when Orangeburg pipe, a tar-impregnated fiber product, was used in parts of the county. Orangeburg goes soft, ovals and blisters from the inside, and a camera can usually spot it by its dark, fuzzy walls. Homes with basements commonly have a cast iron stub through the foundation wall before the line changes to clay or Orangeburg a few feet outside. Anything built after the mid-1970s is usually PVC, which has far fewer joints and far fewer problems.

Why lines fail here

The city sits on the Lake Erie lake plain, a flat landscape of silty clay left behind by the glacial lake. That clay drains slowly and swells when wet, then shrinks in a dry summer, and the pipe moves with it. Add a frost line that runs three feet or deeper in the Conneaut snowbelt and jointed pipe gets lifted and dropped a little every winter. Over fifty or seventy years the result is a line with offset joints and low spots that trap water and paper.

Trees finish the job. Silver maple, willow and sycamore planted along the older streets send fine roots into any joint that weeps moisture. Conneaut Creek and its ravines also keep the water table high in low-lying blocks, so a cracked pipe may run half full of groundwater all spring, which overloads the treatment plant and invites backups.

The oldest parts of the city were originally served by combined sewers that carry storm water and sanitary flow together. During a heavy lake-effect storm those mains surcharge, and a lateral with a belly or an open joint is the path of least resistance back into a basement floor drain.

Lining, bursting or a point repair

A camera inspection comes first, every time, and the installer should hand over the video. If the clay or Orangeburg is cracked, rooted and leaking at the joints but still basically round, cured-in-place pipe lining is the usual recommendation. The line is hydro jetted clean, an epoxy-saturated felt liner is inverted or pulled in from the cleanout, and it is cured with hot water, steam or ultraviolet light. The result is a smooth, jointless pipe inside the old one, and the yard is barely touched.

Lining cannot fix a collapse or a deep sag, and it will not straighten an offset joint. For those, pipe bursting is the trenchless answer. A bursting head is pulled through the old pipe from a pit near the house to a pit near the main, breaking the clay outward while a fused length of HDPE follows behind. For a single bad joint on an otherwise sound line, a sectional point repair, a short liner cured in place over just that spot, is often the most sensible choice.

Permits, the right-of-way and inspection

In Conneaut the sewer permit and the final inspection come from the city, and any work under the sidewalk or street also involves a right-of-way permit. The inspector will want to see the connection at the main and, for bursting jobs, the open pits before backfill. Lining work is generally verified by a post-cure camera run. A good installer pulls the permit as part of the job and schedules the inspection so the homeowner is not left chasing it.

Picking an installer and what the day looks like

Ask every bidder for the camera footage, the proposed method, and the liner or pipe material they intend to use. Ask what happens if the camera finds a collapse after the liner is on the truck. To compare installers, find a verified CIPP contractor and request references from jobs in Ashtabula County, where crews are used to clay soil and deep frost. On the day itself, water use is shut down for a few hours, the crew sets up at the cleanout or digs the access pit, and in most cases the household is back to normal by evening.

Pipe Bursting in Conneaut

How pipe bursting works

A steel cable is threaded through the old sewer line from a pit at one end to a pit at the other. A cone-shaped bursting head, with new high-density polyethylene pipe fused to it, is pulled through by a hydraulic unit. The head splits the old clay or cast iron outward into the soil and the new pipe follows in the same alignment at the same depth. The result is a single fused length of pipe with no joints for roots to find.

When bursting is the right call

• Collapsed sections — a liner needs a host pipe to hold its shape; a collapsed run has none.
• Bellies — a low spot that holds water stays a low spot after lining. Bursting lays new pipe on a fresh bed.
• Undersized lines — bursting can upsize a 3-inch lateral to 4 inches; lining slightly reduces diameter.
• Badly deformed pipe — Orangeburg that has flattened, or cast iron with most of its bottom gone.

What the job looks like

One pit at the house or cleanout, one at the property line or the street connection, each a few feet square. Utilities that cross within a foot or two of the sewer path are located and potholed first. The pull takes an hour or two; the whole job, including fusing, connections, inspection and backfill, is usually one day.

Permits and the street

If the downstream pit is in the sidewalk, parkway or street, a right-of-way permit and restoration to city standards are required in addition to the plumbing permit. If the connection at the main is replaced, the city inspects it before the pit closes. Confirm who is handling this before work starts.

ZIP codes served in Conneaut

Pipe Bursting is available throughout Conneaut, including ZIP codes 44030.

More trenchless services in Conneaut

Questions we hear in Conneaut