Built to Last – Rehabilitating 5 Miles of Sewer Force Main in Newport Beach, CA

Force main assets have long been ‘out of sight and out of mind’ for most utilities, that is until they fail. Over the past decade, utilities across the United States began to focus more aggressively on their force mains, as well as methods to explore and assess the condition of these vital assets, preferably prior to failure. Brown and Caldwell (BC) has led the evaluation of force main inspection technologies, developing inspection programs and providing condition assessments and rehabilitation design of force mains throughout the country. To date, BC has completed the inspection and condition assessment of well over 300,000 meters (1 million feet) of wastewater force mains. The condition assessment work has included the development of defect codes for force mains and decision tools for selecting follow on actions: Re-Inspection, Repair, Rehabilitation or Replacement (the Four R’s). This paper describes a complex force main renewal project that, because of its complexity and sensitivity, required a mix of rehabilitation methodologies, including cured-in-place-pipe (CIPP) and pipe replacement using both open cut and tunneling technologies.