!!!!!

[dreamshark]

This is what our front yard looks like right now. Sewer liner replacement with excavation. Paul Bunyan makes a specialty of installing sewer liners from inside the house without digging, but in our case they couldn't do it due to excesssive "bellying" in the clay pipe section of the main sewer line. 





They explained it all in advance and it seems to be going as planned, but it is still shocking to see your front walk disappear into a 9-foot deep chasm. I was not exactly surprised at the entrenching equipment tearing up the front lawn, but I was surprised how much hand-digging was required. Two sturdy young men spent about 4 hours yesterday and another hour or two today laboring at the bottom of those grave-digger sleeves just to uncover the pipe. 

Comments

[minnehaha]

Yeah, this is what my son-in-law does, all day every day. The grave digger sleeves are so that the hole doesn't collapse and bury them alive. (!)

K.

[davidwilford]

What boggles my mind is that this is being done in February, which used to be when the ground was frozen hard and deep.

[minnehaha]

Right! Like, nowadays, they can dig actual graves any time of the year. For graves, they have a big steamer thing that thaws the ground.

K.

[dreamshark]

Well, they started out digging a big hole with an excavator that apparently can dig right through permafrost. The gravedigger activity is at the bottom of the hole.

[pameladean]

Wow, that is a lot! I assume the hand digging is to prevent the machines from doing even more damage to the sewer line.

I hope they'll be done soon, yikes.

P.

[spiderplanet]

Holy Cats! I saw your more recent post first, and then this one.

That's a lot of excitement.

More fun facts about shoring equipment - The most common workplace death on a construction site is a laborer, and that death is almost always caused by engulfment. Engulfments happen when shoring is missing or inadequate.

[carbonel]

All my sympathies, since I went through the same thing last January. In my case, there was no option to work from inside the house, since it was clear the piping material had either collapsed or disintegrated. I still have a bare spot on the ground, but otherwise you can't tell there had been a large hole in the ground.

[dreamshark]

Did your sewer pipe actually collapse to the point where it wasn't draining any more? Ours never did, just kept filling up with roots despite the most aggressive form of cleaning (Hydrojet). So at least we didn't have to go for days with no sewer drain.

[carbonel]

My sewer pipe actually collapsed. I'd been having Ron the Sewer Rat come and deal with the sewer line regularly, but this was beyond them.

It turned out my pipes weren't clay or some more reasonable material but rather something called Orangeburg pipe that was actually rolled-up tar paper. It was used as a substitute when postwar shortages meant the real thing wasn't available (I was told). My house was built in the early 1950s, I think.

I had a week with zero or limited flushing ability. I wrote about it at greater length here:
https://carbonel.dreamwidth.org/279229.html

[dreamshark]

OMG