The City of Crookston received some repair work to a sanitation pipe on Crescent Avenue on Tuesday. Crews from LaMetti & Sons out of Hugo’s put a wet-pliable liner in to replace part of a missing sanitation pipe said Public Works Director Pat Kelly. “We’ve never really done this in town here,” said Kelly. “That is an extremely deep sanitary sewer line down near the river over by Crescent and South Main. So we felt this might be safer and just as cost effective with this line. We took some quotes and had Lametti and Sons out of Hugo come in yesterday morning at about 6:00 a.m. and reline this section of 24-inch line from manhole to manhole. They got the liner in place and then cut the services out with a robot and were heading home by about midnight.”
Kelly said that while pollution could be an issue with the missing pipe, the bigger concern if you don’t fix it can be moving soil creating an emergency situation along the river bank. “Certainly, once you know you have something that needs fixing you want to get that repaired,” said Kelly. “Even though our soils down that deep are really heavy clay that doesn’t move or wash out a lot you still don’t want to have a catastrophic failure that now it’s an emergency situation. We knew we had some time since we found it late last summer or early fall that we could get prices and find the time for the contractor to get here. We found this during regular maintenance noticing we were getting some blockages around there and we televised that section of line and found this section missing.”
In the past, the City would’ve replaced this pipe by digging a large hole to get to the pipe, but the liner was the safer route to go here. “Given the depth of the line – 16/18 feet – down by the river like that we’d probably get into a situation with a couple of large excavators digging themselves a platform 10 feet down and then having to dig out further,” said Kelly. “It would be just an incredibly huge hole right there by the river and not terribly far from the Otter Tail substation. We felt this was probably the smartest, safest route to go.”
Tags:
