I’m a naturally curious sort of guy. I am interested in how everything works. So when I was driving down Highland Acres Road last weekend and saw this trailer parked in the middle of the road, I had to stop and investigate. At a passing glance I saw the cable going down into the manhole, the room in the front of the trailer with the guy looking out, and the video monitor in the upper corner of the trailer. Looks like something interesting’s going on here.

That’s where I met Jeff from Watertown, SD. He’s working for a company that is going through parts of the sewer system in Bismarck and preparing it for maintenance. The city will be putting polymer sock liners in some of the sanitary sewer lines around the city. But when someone builds a house and taps into the sewer line and weld their pipe to the main line, part of their pipe protrudes into the main line. That’s a problem for anyone trying to stuff a liner down the pipe. That’s where Jeff’s company comes in.

He’s operating a motorized camera/light rig that drives down the pipe. From the other end of the neighborhood are the rest of the crew, driving up a machine that spins inside the pipe, flinging 3 lengths of chain and driven by 2000 PSI of water pressure. The machine grinds away the protruding lengths of pipe or any other obstructions so that the liner may be applied to the pipe later. Jeff’s job is to use his camera/ light to spot protrusions and give the other guys directions to hone them out of the pipe. They communicate by 2-way radio and he tells them which way to go back and forth until the pipe is honed clear.

This machine does a pretty slick job. Jeff’s got computers and a tape machine, and they record and log everything they do. They can then provide the city with a diagram of the length of pipe they’ve serviced, labeled as to where they encountered obstructions, what they looked like, how they were dealt with, and what the pipe looks like after they’ve cleared it. He showed me printouts of all of that stuff. It’s really pretty slick.

Thanks to Jeff for the explanation. He’s also got a couple of Canon digital SLRs like me and enjoys wildlife photography, so we had a really nice chat. It was quite gracious of him to explain everything he’s doing and take time during his busy evening to show me all the stuff that they do.

So just remember…the reason everything works the way it does is because the city’s got guys like Jeff and his crew that help maintain and upgrade the system. And they’ve got cool machinery to enable them to get that job done.