Clearwater, Florida Water Utilities Turns to Trenchless

Life and vacation time in Clearwater, Florida is about the full beach town experience. It is one of those places in life where, if you have been there and experienced even a fraction of what it has to offer, it will forever be etched into your memory as one of the most fantastic places to go. And, if you’ve only been there once, you’ll feel compelled to return to experience it all over again.

The manicured, white sand with the consistency of fine sugar, the sparkling aqua blue water, and some of the best bars, hotels, and restaurants Florida has to offer, make Clearwater one of the few places on Earth where you can encounter the full spectrum of life and fun in the sun.

The Clearwater experience is truly about enjoying coastal beach life, not tied up in construction caused traffic jams or the eyesore of gouged earth to stain the image one brings back home to everyday life once one leaves the beach. That latter image is best left to open-cut utility installation. 

Like most towns in the United States that have been around for more than 100 years, Clearwater has pipeline infrastructure that is starting to show its age. The inherently corrosive nature of the salt water and sand of its beaches are particularly hard on the materials used in the past, such as cast and ductile iron.

The City of Clearwater took the lead in upgrading the failing infrastructure to keep the city beautiful and functional for centuries to come, and one of those upgrade technologies it decided to deploy is the trusted combination of pre-chlorinated pipe bursting with high density polyethylene (HDPE) pipe replacement. Murphy Pipeline Contractors (MPC) won the bid for the project, and work began soon after. 

To anyone familiar with Clearwater, it seems obvious that traditional open-cut water main replacement just doesn’t fit well into the pristine landscape of the beach town, the geographically restricted roads leading to its most beautiful destinations, nor the immaculately groomed residential neighborhoods that are nestled within its borders. Open-cut pipeline replacement requires excavations along the entire length of the pipes being replaced, leaving often deep and ugly trenches that mar up large swaths of the environment around such projects and make navigating around them difficult; sometimes even dangerous. At the very least, the necessarily expansive excavations, open-cut projects are visually jarring to longtime residents or tourists expecting to see the unblemished, natural beauty Clearwater has come to be known for.  

Pipe bursting, however; —the “minimally invasive surgery” of the pipeline replacement world — reduces all of those impacts down to the smallest elemental sizes and ensures daily life and tourism go on with little interruption. By excavating only an insertion pit and exit pit, and even smaller surgical excavations for water service meters, trenchless pipe bursting for water main replacements turns a typically disruptive project into a barely noticeable construction operation. 

The City of Clearwater Water Utilities services around 8,000 residents and thousands of businesses that are not just limited to its fantastic hotels, resorts and restaurants. Marinas, shopping centers, and even the famed Clearwater Marine Aquarium are sustained by the water infrastructure provided by the city. Add to that, the nearly 15 million visitors to this magnificent town per year and it’s easy to see why the city decided to go the less-intrusive construction route that trenchless offers.

Narrow roads and walkways are the arteries that serve the barrier islands and coastal cities of Florida, which tend to be restricted by slender land masses and natural bodies of water; it doesn’t take too much to clog them up. Open-cut projects, by their nature, are expansive in scope and cause traffic delays that can be much more profound in such tight spaces. 

Thus far, more than 6,000 lf of 4-in.6-in. and 8-in. water mains have been replaced in the Clearwater residential community of Island Estates, using trenchless technology. 

Weston Haggen, of CHA Consulting, is the lead design engineer for the water main replacement project at Island Estates. With trenchless pipe bursting being brought into play for this extensive pipeline replacement, he explains what his experience has been using this technique vs. open-cut. “Trenchless has been quicker and cleaner. Residents have been happier, overall, with the reduced physical scope of the project compared to the larger areas needed for open-cut,” he said.

Having overseen multiple open-cut projects, Weston offered, “It’s more economical, as well.” The reduced footprint of these more surgical projects reduces the size and scope of road, concrete, and green restoration, which is often a large portion of a project’s total cost. 

 This project is the first large-scale water main project utilizing HDPE for the City of Clearwater. The original host pipe materials encountered, so far, have been cast iron and ductile iron, with a few short stretches of C900 PVC throughout the islands. 

Haggen describes how the transition for the City in using the newer material has gone. “There was a bit of a learning curve with using the pre-chlorination process, but transition to the new materials and techniques were mostly seamless,” he said. 

Haggen adds about future maintenance or repairs of the new pipeline, “The HDPE is more durable and less prone to leaks over time because it has fewer joints and has complete fusion when joining lengths of pipe together. Future maintenance or repairs by municipalities should be completed in the same manner as the cast iron, ductile iron, or PVC they’re already used to because the components used with the new material are the same standard items used with other materials.” 

One of the first phases of the project took place on Palm Island Northeast and Palm Island Southeast; two “finger islands” located within the Island Estates community. Residential homes were placed on a water bypass system by Murphy Pipelines to ensure that interruption in water service was kept to a minimum. Once the bypass line was activated, water services were transferred from the old water main to the temporary bypass. The process for each service typically took a few minutes to transfer. 

Although the residents were notified that they would be briefly without water, few even noticed the transition due to the extremely short duration each service transfer took. The same process was repeated in reverse once the new main was installed and activated via the trenchless method, and residents were able to continue with their day-to-day with barely any disruption. 

With the trenchless construction technology used by Murphy Pipelines, thousands of linear feet of failing water infrastructure were replaced with the durability of HDPE. The island community went about their normal routines and way of life without having to deal with the challenges typically associated with the intrusive nature of open-cut water main replacement. The bumper-to-bumper traffic, the sounds of concrete and asphalt being cut over large stretches of road and walkways, and the visual and environmental impact long trenches make were virtually eliminated by the community-friendly pre-chlorinated pipe bursting method used by MPC.

Traffic flowed almost completely uninterrupted through the tight neighborhood roads that would have come to a near standstill had the roads been cleaved and split apart by an open-cut operation. 

More than 6,000 lf of failing water main infrastructure was replaced in a handful of months that would have taken exceedingly longer had the labor-intensive excavation of open-cut been the rule of the day. 

All of these tangible and quantifiable obstacles were eliminated by using the latest trenchless construction techniques employed by MPC. 

Though both tangible and quantifiable, some of the most important aspects of life enjoyed by residents of and visitors to Clearwater can be expressed much more simply:

Sunsets over the aqua and turquoise blue water washing up on the white, powdery fine sands were enjoyed without the jarring visuals of open trenches carved into the earth to sully the landscape of this most famous beach town. 

Forrest Parham is project manager with Murphy Pipelines.