To supply water to a new subdivision, it was necessary to not only add a
junction to the water main but to also join up two dead-end segments serving
two separate halves of a loop road. The work was to be done in two phases,
which would involve temporarily interrupting water service to different
groups of abutters on different days. The subdivision road happened to
connect near the end of one of the lines, so the developers decided to do
that part first and get their connection into the new neighborhood-to-be
finished.
As that segment also serves my house, the water would be off most of the day so I was ready with bottles and buckets filled up. [Each image links to a larger version that shows more detail.] |
Finally the section fell away with a thump, and they huffed it up out of the pit. The poor guy was totally soaked at this point, but I guess they're quite used to this sort of thing. |
Not only was the old pipe in good shape on the outside, it was almost pristine on the inside too. Roman aqueducts aside, for a vintage-1956 or so installation in cast iron that's kind of amazing. No inordinate deposits or corrosion, and likely no concerns about future capacity with a healthy six-inch main feeding relatively few houses along this stretch. And they were about to join up *two* six-inch mains around the loop which would then both combine to feed the subdivision, increasing the net capacity to this point and adding redundancy to the system as well. |
They had already pre-assembled the tee and three new valves in eight-inch pipe, which the backhoe now floated over from somewhere back in the site. |
To align the stem of the tee with where they needed the subdivision supply pipe to go, they added a two-foot nipple before going into the valve. |
The guys spent some time laying one or two more pieces of pipe off the stem
of the T toward the subdivision site, and connecting to the run they'd
already installed up there and backfilling most of that. Then they came
back to the pit here to continue. Since they weren't connecting to the
other remaining part of the old pipe they simply capped that valve opening
off for the moment, thus disabling the nearby hydrant completely -- they
intended to remove and replace it with a new one when the rest of the loop
went in, but weren't ready to do that part yet. However, there was one
more house tied in beyond the cut and they needed to restore water
service to that.
They decided to bring that home's service off the middle of the T since it was handily exposed here, using a fitting called a corporation stop. This would be a nice demo of how subscribers typically get tied into a water main. A drilling jig is chained around the pipe, which guides a special bit that drills and taps a hole in one operation. |