SPANISH FORK — City officials are looking at a less expensive way to repair buried broken water and sewer lines with high-tech plastic lining.
Repairing a broken pipe, including digging it up, replacing and reburying it, adding new pavement and hiring traffic control, runs about $75 a foot, city engineer Richard Heap said at a City Council meeting Tuesday.
Using plastic liner costs about $30 a foot. The liner is guided into the pipe through manholes and covers up fractures, tree roots or anything else working its way into the pipe. A special tool, working inside the pipe, cuts out areas where service lines branch into a main line.
Not all underground pipes lend themselves to a liner treatment, he said, but about 20,000 feet of the city's sewer and water lines do. It doesn't work on pipes that are offset. The first bids will likely go out in March.
"It's a way to save a few hundred thousand dollars," Heap said.
— Rodger Hardy