Replacing 20-year-old ductile iron with Fusible PVC® pipe
| Date: | December 2017 |
| Market: | Municipal Infrastructure Rehabilitation |
| Capability: | New Pipelines |
| Brand: | Underground Solutions |
| Location: | United States |
The Queen Anne’s County Maryland Sanitary District recently completed an improvement project for an existing 16-inch force main. Replacement of the existing pipe included a new 24-inch pipe installation under Cox Creek using horizontal directional drilling (HDD) methodology. Cox Creek is an environmentally sensitive waterway that feeds into the Chesapeake Bay and is part of the Chesapeake Bay watershed.
The Cox Creek crossing was necessary to replace a failing 16-inch ductile iron pipe that had succumbed to corrosion after only 20 years of service. Queen Anne’s County also took the opportunity to expand the capacity of the system with a 24-inch pipeline, since the area has seen significant growth in the last decade.
Fusible PVC® pipe was competitively bid against high-density polyethylene (HDPE) pipe of an equivalent flow and pressure class for the HDD installation. The Queen Anne’s County engineers chose to limit material options to Fusible PVC® pipe and HDPE due to the corrosive conditions that caused the premature pipe failure of the 16-inch ductile iron. Queen Anne’s County engineers utilized 30-inch DR 11 HDPE and the hydraulically equivalent 24-inch DR 18 Fusible PVC® pipe for the flow and pressure requirements of the force main.
