Health Concerns Mount As More Old Sewer Pipes Are Lined With Plastic (scientificamerican.com) 95
Residents near renovation sites claim noxious emissions from pipe inserts are making them sick. Scientific American reports: Earlier this year Nicole Davis arrived at one of the San Antonio, Tex., offices of the audiology practice she co-owns ready to see the day's patients. But upon entering her office, Davis says she quickly noticed a noxious odor that smelled like paint thinner. Her eyes started burning. By noon, she felt nauseated and dizzy, with the burning sensation spreading to her nose and throat. Her mouth went numb. Co-workers in the building told Davis that they felt ill, too. By the evening, she says, she was vomiting. Two days later, Davis received an e-mail from an employee for a construction firm that was doing work that week on municipal pipes below street-level near the building. The employee apologized in the e-mail for Davis's "recent experience," and attached a technical document describing the hazards and health risks associated with materials used to make plastic in the pipe project. The e-mail and attachment do not state that the work caused the odor or Davis's reaction.
The company was renovating an underground sewer pipe with a widely and increasingly used technique called cured-in-place pipes. A felt or composite sleeve is saturated, typically with a polyester or vinyl ester resin. Workers thread the sleeve through an underground pipe and then inflate and heat it, often with steam or hot water. The sleeve hardens to form a continuous plastic liner along the old pipe's inner walls. The technique is less expensive and takes less time than fully replacing old sewer-system pipes and stormwater culverts. [...] Davis's experience reflects, in part, the scarcity of reliable, industry-independent research and public health advice about potential risks associated with the cured-in-place pipe, or CIPP, method. The practice has grown steadily in the past two decades, with more than 35,000 miles of the liners installed worldwide, according to a 2017 market report by BCC Research. CIPP is the most popular method among a group of pipe-renovation techniques that require minimal digging as compared with excavating an old pipe and replacing it. With billions of dollars spent and loaned annually in the U.S. alone to restore deteriorating pipes, the market for lower-cost renovation approaches is forecast to remain strong for several years. The report goes on to say that there have been more than 100 incidents spanning 29 U.S. states in the past 15 years from CIPP. "Children have been mentioned in news stories and other reports in more than a dozen of those 100 cases, including a September incident in Seneca Falls, N.Y., in which middle school students reportedly felt sick from a CIPP job several hundred feet from their classroom," reports Scientific American.
"Studies by [Purdue University]'s group have revealed that jobs at study sites, where installers used steam to harden the resin, release a mixture of vaporized and liquid droplets of organic compounds and water, as well as particles of partially hardened resin, into the air. The compounds include hazardous air pollutants such as styrene and methylene chloride, as well as dibutyl phthalate, which some studies have identified as an endocrine disruptor. But other emitted compounds vary, possibly depending on the type of resin used and other operational differences."
Some of the first findings to look into the health implications of exposures to CIPP emissions "found alterations in gene expression and protein production in exposed cells, inflammation and injuries or with abnormal function in organs," the report says. "The findings show the potential for adverse health effects in humans," although the findings "differed from site to site, by the type of cells exposed, and by the genes and proteins examined."
The company was renovating an underground sewer pipe with a widely and increasingly used technique called cured-in-place pipes. A felt or composite sleeve is saturated, typically with a polyester or vinyl ester resin. Workers thread the sleeve through an underground pipe and then inflate and heat it, often with steam or hot water. The sleeve hardens to form a continuous plastic liner along the old pipe's inner walls. The technique is less expensive and takes less time than fully replacing old sewer-system pipes and stormwater culverts. [...] Davis's experience reflects, in part, the scarcity of reliable, industry-independent research and public health advice about potential risks associated with the cured-in-place pipe, or CIPP, method. The practice has grown steadily in the past two decades, with more than 35,000 miles of the liners installed worldwide, according to a 2017 market report by BCC Research. CIPP is the most popular method among a group of pipe-renovation techniques that require minimal digging as compared with excavating an old pipe and replacing it. With billions of dollars spent and loaned annually in the U.S. alone to restore deteriorating pipes, the market for lower-cost renovation approaches is forecast to remain strong for several years. The report goes on to say that there have been more than 100 incidents spanning 29 U.S. states in the past 15 years from CIPP. "Children have been mentioned in news stories and other reports in more than a dozen of those 100 cases, including a September incident in Seneca Falls, N.Y., in which middle school students reportedly felt sick from a CIPP job several hundred feet from their classroom," reports Scientific American.
"Studies by [Purdue University]'s group have revealed that jobs at study sites, where installers used steam to harden the resin, release a mixture of vaporized and liquid droplets of organic compounds and water, as well as particles of partially hardened resin, into the air. The compounds include hazardous air pollutants such as styrene and methylene chloride, as well as dibutyl phthalate, which some studies have identified as an endocrine disruptor. But other emitted compounds vary, possibly depending on the type of resin used and other operational differences."
Some of the first findings to look into the health implications of exposures to CIPP emissions "found alterations in gene expression and protein production in exposed cells, inflammation and injuries or with abnormal function in organs," the report says. "The findings show the potential for adverse health effects in humans," although the findings "differed from site to site, by the type of cells exposed, and by the genes and proteins examined."
Re: Once again, NOTHING of val (Score:1)
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The same joke yet again. How tedious.
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Luckily for the planet it only makes headlines when a human is affected by this stuff. We need all the humans we can get!
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Well they could isolate the pipe, line it and then flush it through, thus avoiding the contamination problem. But that would cost money so will only be done if legally required, either by law or by lawsuit.
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No many nations have the "free" cash to replace entire sections of pipe in that way....
So they work with the tech they have, can afford, can use, that works and will keep working for years...
ie that's often not "isolate the pipe" as the system is in "use" in the real world...
Longer waits to do some "isolate the pipe" project would create different problems.
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You just turn the valve to isolate a section of pipe. It's easier to fix leaks when you don't have high pressure water spewing out and they cost very little so they have valves everywhere already.
The only cost is the flushing.
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But its cheaper than digging them up and replacing them with lead pipes so whatcha gunna do?
Lead pipes were used for potable water, not sewers. Sewers used cast iron pipe.
Lead is more expensive than cast iron, but it imparts a sweet taste to the drinking water, while cast iron discolors the water and gives it a rusty taste.
Today, PVC is used for both potable water and sewers in new construction.
The cure-in-place lining for the cast iron sewer pipes seems to work okay. They just need to evacuate the buildings above it for a few days while it is curing.
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Many sewers use clay pipes.
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That's why the colloquial "lead pipe cinch" is a good thing.
Re: Plastic (Score:1)
Re:Plastic (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Plastic (Score:4, Interesting)
Probably because they have floor drains in the building that haven’t had any water added to them in years.
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You get your drinking water supply directly from the sewer?
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Not all plastic is evil, get over yourselves. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Not all plastic is evil, get over yourselves. (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, it's in the sewage system. If you have odors and noxious fumes from the sewage system penetrating your living or working spaces, perhaps it would be a good idea to check for siphoning going on in your traps or other cracks and leaks because there's other stuff down there you definitely don't want.
Re: Not all plastic is evil, get over yourselves. (Score:5, Informative)
On the other hand, it's in the sewage system. If you have odors and noxious fumes from the sewage system penetrating your living or working spaces, perhaps it would be a good idea to check for siphoning going on in your traps or other cracks and leaks because there's other stuff down there you definitely don't want.
In general, yes, but this CIPP process involves pressurizing the pipes. Sewage drains are protected against backflow by traps [wikipedia.org], which use a little water to block the sewer gases and odors from entering living spaces. This works perfectly in normal conditions, but it if the pressure in the downstream sewer pipes rises much above atmospheric pressure, the water seal is broken. Drains are vented specifically to prevent such pressure rises, but it's easy to see how the CIPP operation could pump so much pressure in that the ability of the vents to equalize pressure is overcome.
I don't think backflow as a result of a CIPP installation is likely to indicate any sort of deeper plumbing problem. It just represents a poorly-handled CIPP installation... either they need to ensure that the pipes they're working on are isolated so pressure rises can't escape, or they need to remove people and animals from the area.
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In flood zones the sewage system is also often protected by a backflow valve [squareoneinsurance.com]. It's probably a good idea to have one of those in every sewer installation, but people who don't legally have to have one usually don't.
Re: Not all plastic is evil, get over yourselves. (Score:1)
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They are costly to install
They are costly to retrofit, and then only when the installation has to occur under concrete. I've participated in the installation of a backflow valve in Lakeport, CA where the property in question is only a few feet above lake level, and it was not part of new construction.
and require regular (usually annual) certified inspection.
Yes, where they are required. But where they are not, they don't.
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In flood zones the sewage system is also often protected by a backflow valve [squareoneinsurance.com]. It's probably a good idea to have one of those in every sewer installation, but people who don't legally have to have one usually don't.
Check valves are required for good reason in flood zones. Elsewhere, they'd just be a waste of money and a point of failure. Sure, in extremely rare circumstances they would prevent a nasty mess, but the odds of that are low enough that it's more cost-effective to omit them and let insurance cover the rare events.
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Well, they're in California. Coming in off the street, the inside smell just like the outside, so how were they supposed to know their trap was empty?
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There must be some pretty peculiar plumbing. Most plumbing I've seen had p traps and similiar kinds of pipes to prevent noxious fumes from entering habitable areas of a building. I get that some leakage is inevitable, but this sounds like a pretty tremendous failure of the interior plumbing as well.
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The plastic is not the problem. The problem is how they worked with it here.
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Well, I am a bit baffled by the smell. If you can smell it then it outgasses plenty of stuff you don't want to ingest.
On the other hand there are certainly plastics which are quite hard (plasticizers outgas as those are usually small-ish molecules in the matrix of the polymer) and can be used repeatedly. At work we have company bottles for water from such a plastic. Brand new you can't smell anything. And, since we are nerds working in a chemistry labs we also ran the water from the bottle, water that was t
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Plastic isn't evil. However, some uses of it are. It's a very useful material. However, it's also got some bad parts to it - in that when discarded, it hang
Traps (Score:2, Insightful)
Hum, if there are gasses coming from the sewer into your building then their are serious problems with the drainage in your building and it is not compliant with code/building regulations.
Basically gasses coming from a sewer into the building should simply not be possible. Sue the building owner, and if that is you serves you right for a dodgy building.
Re:Traps (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe the gasses were coming from the ventilation system sucking up surrounding air.
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Re:Traps (Score:5, Informative)
Under normal conditions, yes. But conditions were not normal, they were steam curing a pipe liner. Perhaps they exceeded pressure specifications in a segment of the sewer.
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A backflow preventer in theory should stop that. Unless of course it's in a building so old that it's not required to be up to code on that, but even then most commercial buildings at least around here have installed them simply because it significantly cut insurance premiums.
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Many/most sewage backflow devices require the backflow of liquid [youtube.com] to close off the building from the city mains.
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Double check valves are what are most commonly used around here, they don't require liquid to work, only pressure of any kind coming from the city main. Despite them being popular here in Canada, they're also popular in Texas and Florida. The house I own down in Zephyrhills has one installed so does every neighbor along the street. Most of the houses were built in the very early 1950's.
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A backwater device is not required by code in most places. As others have pointed out, they're popular in places prone to flooding.
P traps are adequate to code in most places, just enough to make gases waft up the vents rather than coming out of the drain.
Re:Traps (Score:5, Informative)
I was around one of these projects while they they were steam curing it a couple years ago.
The "chemical" odor was very strong around the "end" of the insert opposite of where they were injecting the steam. I don't seem very sensitive to such things but if I lived within about 100 feet of the "output" end, the odor likely would have been very noticeable and I'm pretty sure I would have closed my windows (or left them open and found somewhere else to be for an hour or two).
Here's an example [youtube.com] of what appears to be the "bad end" (the whole video shows some highlights from the process).
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In this case the contractor shut the water off to reduce the quantity of sewage they needed to deal with. Since this was a multi family complex with each building having one or two laterals to the main with a manhole where the lateral connected to the main, they put in pumps to capture any sewage (such as from toilet flushing or other "stored water" uses) from the laterals and sent it to a point "downstream" of where the insert was being installed.
Although these chemicals may be used in products around us e
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Re: Traps (Score:3, Funny)
The American dream is suffering an injury at the hands of someone with comprehensive liability cover. It used to be achieving an easy and happy life through hard work and dedication, but you know, fuck that.
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It used to be achieving an easy and happy life through hard work and dedication
You misspelled "the suffering of others" there.
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Not as a first step anyway. Suing is for when they fail to sort it out after asking nicely.
It's not good that sewer gases are getting into the building; however it's probably not a serious or compliance issue at all, but just an air admittance valve that needs cleaning/replacing. Easy fix.
Or the air pressure of the work they're doing has blown the traps, in which case just run the sinks and flush the toilets (and perhaps warn locals when they're doing the work so they can open their windows).
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Nice try but I am British....
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No. It is normal when work is being done on the sewers.
A few months ago, a pipe under the ground floor in my place was clogged; it was cleared using a water jet. This created underpressure at some time, sucking the water out of all the traps in the building.
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Basically gasses coming from a sewer into the building should simply not be possible.
Latin plumbers, that's all I can say. I've lived in Latin America for the past 30+ years and no fucking "plumber" down here has a clue about what the fuck they are doing. Latin America smells like shit - literally. Go to Panama's "Costa del Este" filled with brand new 50+ story buildings, between the air fresheners in all the elevators and hallways and the smell of raw sewage, it's impossible to breathe. But they want you to pay a million or more for that "luxury" apartment. But hey, hiring an immigrant to
Re:Traps (Score:4, Interesting)
The upside is that there's an easy workaround - go away for a few hours. Let the people in the immediate area know they have to vacate for a little while while the pipes are being refitted. Their water is already being cut off, so it might be for the best or even necessary in many cases. I'm pretty sure many places have rules requiring workplaces have working bathrooms, but I could be wrong.
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The upside is that there's an easy workaround - go away for a few hours.
That's easy for people who are physically able, and who aren't dependent on being in the location in order to earn income.
If these emissions are toxic, they should be required to a) prevent backflow from the installation, and b) use a carbon or zeolite filter to capture the emissions. There's no reason whatsoever that they should be able to emit toxics when that's avoidable.
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Not exactly. The drain traps have to have liquid in them to block sewer gas. An unused sink or floor drain won't -- the water evaporates over time.
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We used to freebase our lead back in the day.
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Re:The larger question (Score:5, Insightful)
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Simple, installing new pipes into open land during new construction of buildings was easy as nothing was in the way. Now, those same pipes are under buildings, parking lots, sidewalks, and roadways; they probably are crossed over top by other underground infrastructure like electric wire and gas lines. Replacing them by digging is not so easy anymore and gets very expensive very fast. Or someone that doesn't want their yard dug up and has the time and money to fight it with a lawyer makes it not worth the trouble.
Exactly. Anecdotally speaking, around here I often see them replacing water/sewer lines when roads are torn up for replacement, which makes sense. The places I see them using this in place lining method seem to mostly be places where the road is is good condition and tearing it up is both far more expensive and will also likely cause a perfectly good road to fail more quickly in the future.
No question we have an infrastructure deficit that urgently needs to be addressed, but I certainly can't complain tha
Re:The larger question (Score:4, Insightful)
Because cut and cover is enormously disruptive and requires huge amounts of manpower. Not to mention many of the pipes are things like asbestos concrete that you don't want to dig up anyway if you can avoid it.
My counterpoint to the statistic in the article is that if you replaced all sliplining projects with cut and cover then you would have far greater than 100 "incidents" in 15 years just from people falling in the open holes, not to mention injuries to workers. Even with stringent safety precautions, pipe replacement is not a particularly safe job.
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I have never understood this. Overall, with mechanization, automation, better building logistics, and cheaper material costs, the ability to build and maintain infrastructure should be cheaper than it was in the 50s/60s when it was put in. Now, the huge projects we see municipal places doing are stadiums on the taxpayer dime for for-profit leagues, while basic things like roads, sewage, electrical just go by the wayside until something catastrophic happens like a bridge falling down, or a water main break
Why not add flexible liners? (Score:2)
If there was flexible liner on the outer and inner side it would keep the resin contained until cured. Doesn't need to be especially durable, just need to survive the curing and then it can rot away.
It can be done (Score:2)
showed such a method. [youtube.com]
I'd be curious to see more research (Score:2)
I mean, it seems like a clever, cheap technique (you know, to avoid that massive capital-repair bill we all in the developed world know is coming due for our aging sewer and water systems...) but I'm not sure I understand specifically what the risks are?
I see two:
1) on installation, the venting of waste steam / water used to cure the sleeve, and
2) after installation, ongoing later-curing of the liner would vent evaporated solvents back UP the line whenever empty (ie since the lines generally slope down for
Sounds Like Bad Venting (Score:2)
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EXACTLY!
Common knowledge? (Score:1)
Doing it on the cheap (Score:2)
I have walked next to sewers that were renovated using this technique in Europe. The difference was proper ventilation, cleaning of exhaust and release of the hit air used far above street level. You did not even smell anything. I expect that this company here was doing it on the cheap and just blowing out the unfiltered air at street level. That is pretty bad.
Penny wise and... (Score:1)
First they try and kill people off with lead in the drinking water and now it's "styrene and methylene chloride, as well as dibutyl phthalate". But it was cheaper so why not, eh? The trouble is that the communities that opted for this quick fix are likely going to have to do the more expensive dig-up-and-replace method they were trying to avoid. So the whole process will end up paying up for labor twice, not to mention the cost of new pipe, and the payout to the people who will be suing the city. Cue the "c
Experience (Score:1)
U-Trap issue (Score:2)
If she is smelling something like this in her office environment it's not the sewage pipes in the ground outside her office.
It's her office's own internal plumbing issue. There are zero good reasons why the fumes should be coming back out of the system.
The plastic smell will most likely disappear.as the resin hardens. But, the methane and all the other "fun" stuff that must be coming back up might just kill her under the right circumstances.
Don't strike a match at the wrong time.
Translation (Score:2)
Someone didnâ(TM)t vent it correctly.
Did the drain pipe in my front yard (Score:1)
I have a 2' drain pipe in my front yard that goes under the street. It's 30 years old. This summer they showed up with a bunch of trucks and about 6 hours later the rusty, end of life filled with holes pipe had a new plastic liner that'll be around long after I'm gone I think. Frickin' tough. I'm wondering how it'll hold up to ice, snow, salt, temperature, etc. No noticeable side effects from what they did.