Pipe Bursting in Blue Ash

The pipe under a Blue Ash ranch

Drive the streets off Cooper Road, Hunt Road or Kenwood Road and the housing tells the story: brick ranches from the 1950s, split-levels from the 1960s, and two-story colonials from the 1970s in the subdivisions closer to Reed Hartman Highway. Each era used a different building sewer. The earliest homes got vitrified clay in two- or three-foot jointed lengths. The 1955 to 1970 subdivisions frequently got Orangeburg, a tar-impregnated wood fiber pipe that was legal, cheap and easy to lay. Homes from the mid-1970s on usually have PVC or ABS plastic.

Nearly every house in Blue Ash has a basement or at least a crawl space, so the first ten to twenty feet of the line, from the main stack to just outside the foundation wall, is cast iron. That iron is now 50 to 70 years old and often scaled on the inside or rusted through at the bottom, a separate failure from whatever is happening in the yard.

Sycamore Creek clay, frost and roots

Blue Ash sits on glacial till that is mostly dense clay with a few sand lenses, draining toward Sycamore Creek and the Little Miami. That clay holds water, swells when wet and shrinks when dry, and the frost line here reaches roughly 30 inches in a cold winter. The seasonal movement is small but relentless, and over decades it opens clay joints and crushes Orangeburg.

The other factor is the trees. The developers planted silver maples, pin oaks and sweetgums on nearly every lot, and 60 years later their root systems reach the sewer. Roots enter at clay joints and at the seam where cast iron meets clay. On an Orangeburg lateral they do not need a joint; they grow straight through the softened wall. A slow kitchen drain or a gurgling basement floor drain in an older Blue Ash home is almost always one of these two causes.

Which method fits which pipe

Cured-in-place pipe lining works when the host pipe still has a round cross-section. The crew jets the line clean, cuts roots flush, then installs an epoxy-saturated felt liner by inversion or pull-in and cures it with hot water, steam or UV. The liner bonds to the old clay and becomes a continuous jointless pipe, and it can turn through the gentle bends that are common where a Blue Ash lateral angles toward the street.

Deformed Orangeburg is a pipe bursting job. There is nothing round left to line, so the installer digs an entry pit near the house and an exit pit at the main, pulls a bursting head through on a cable or rods, and tows new fused HDPE in behind it. For a single bad spot, a crushed section under the driveway or a dropped joint near the curb, a sectional point repair installs a few feet of liner over only that area and leaves the rest alone.

MSD permits and the right-of-way

Blue Ash laterals are regulated by the Metropolitan Sewer District of Greater Cincinnati, which issues the building sewer permit and sends an inspector to see the finished connection or review the post-installation video. The City of Blue Ash separately permits any opening in the street or sidewalk. Because the property owner is responsible for the whole lateral, both permits land on the homeowner's side of the invoice, though the contractor normally pulls them.

The practical advantage of lining is that it rarely touches the public right-of-way at all. When bursting is required and the exit pit has to be in the tree lawn or pavement, the city's restoration standards apply, and the schedule stretches to allow for the street permit.

What happens on the day

A good crew arrives with a camera, a sonde locator and a jetter. They inspect, mark the pipe path on the lawn with paint and flags, record the depth, and then clean the line and inspect again before deciding the final method. Lining itself takes a few hours, and the house is without drains during the cure. By late afternoon there is a finished video of a smooth new bore.

Choosing the installer matters as much as the method. Ask for the before and after videos, a written material spec for the liner or HDPE, and a warranty that covers root re-entry. To compare contractors working in Blue Ash, find a verified CIPP contractor and request those three things from each. Anyone who quotes a Blue Ash lateral without a camera has not accounted for the chance that it is Orangeburg.

Pipe Bursting in Blue Ash

How pipe bursting works

A steel cable is threaded through the old sewer line from a pit at one end to a pit at the other. A cone-shaped bursting head, with new high-density polyethylene pipe fused to it, is pulled through by a hydraulic unit. The head splits the old clay or cast iron outward into the soil and the new pipe follows in the same alignment at the same depth. The result is a single fused length of pipe with no joints for roots to find.

When bursting is the right call

• Collapsed sections — a liner needs a host pipe to hold its shape; a collapsed run has none.
• Bellies — a low spot that holds water stays a low spot after lining. Bursting lays new pipe on a fresh bed.
• Undersized lines — bursting can upsize a 3-inch lateral to 4 inches; lining slightly reduces diameter.
• Badly deformed pipe — Orangeburg that has flattened, or cast iron with most of its bottom gone.

What the job looks like

One pit at the house or cleanout, one at the property line or the street connection, each a few feet square. Utilities that cross within a foot or two of the sewer path are located and potholed first. The pull takes an hour or two; the whole job, including fusing, connections, inspection and backfill, is usually one day.

Permits and the street

If the downstream pit is in the sidewalk, parkway or street, a right-of-way permit and restoration to city standards are required in addition to the plumbing permit. If the connection at the main is replaced, the city inspects it before the pit closes. Confirm who is handling this before work starts.

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