Underground Construction - May 2018 - 32

pany was a unique opportunity,
as we were an aggressive team,
constantly pushing the envelope. While the industry was
cutting its teeth on 8 to 24-inch
pipes, we were constantly raising
the bar with respect to size.
This led to a noteworthy project involving the 60-inch diameter outfall sewer to Little Rock's
Adams Field Treatment Plant,
which consisted of 6,000 linear
feet of pipe that ran underneath
a runway at the Little Rock
Airport, as well as underneath
a building where passengers
checked in and were ticketed. It
was discovered that the 40-foot
deep pipe had two missing pieces. It was at least 30 feet below
the water table, and it would
take months to get the water
down to a level where LRWU
could make a point repair. The
Airport Authority knew it had
to be fixed immediately as it had
created a huge hole beneath the
ramp area where American Airlines jets parked at the gate!
The only solution LRWU felt
it had at that time was to line
the pipe using the CIPP technology. Further, because of the
pipe's location under the main
runway, it was decided that one
of the installs would have to be a
single 2,100 linear foot length of
33mm thick CIPP. This brought
Eric Woods, Insituform's inventor, from England to observe
the project because a CIPP installation of this scope, in both
diameter and length, had never
been done before. The logistics
were also extremely complicated, including bringing the liner
to the job site on two flat beds
and using cranes to lift the ends
off the transport vehicles and
splicing them into one length in
the field.
As luck would have it, the
project didn't go perfectly at
first. The outside temperature
soared to 106 degreesF and the
32

MAY 2018 | UConOnline.com

Everything NASSCO does goes back
to setting standards. I personally
am a proponent of NASSCO
performance standards over vendorsupplied standards because many of
those that come from manufacturers
read like recipes.
resin became too warm due to
the slowness of the wet-out
process and it began to kick off.
Those were the early days, so we
didn't have the static mixers we
have now to continually initiate
and pump the resin into the
waiting tube; the resin was delivered in 55-gallon drums that
we refrigerated at a warehouse
near the airport, added the catalyst and then brought to the job
site. Despite throwing dry ice
and trying to save the installation, we had to cut our losses,
re-group and then try again.
The second time was a charm.
The weather cooled down and
the installation was completed
without a hitch. The subsequent
installs also went well.

New direction
After my time at Insituform I
went on to work for Advanced
Drainage Systems, a company
that manufactures corrugated
polyethylene pipe, a product
which won the American Society
of Engineer's "Most Innovative
New Product" award for their
HC pipe. I was a product development team member. I would
spend eight years with ADC
and moved from Little Rock
to Columbus, Ohio, where its
headquarters was located. We
did some amazing things from

an engineering perspective. I
worked with design engineers
in over 42 countries during this
timeframe. I designed a 36-inch
diameter pipe for a depth of
bury of approximately 1,000
feet, designed pipes in South
America that saw a 100-degree F
temperature change daily in an
above ground trench, and eight
hydroelectric plants in the jungles of Costa Rica.
After Advanced Drainage
Systems I went to work for CSR
Hydro Conduit, an installer of
CIPP and U-Liner as their general manager in Hilliard, Ohio.
I started with just one installation crew and grew that business
to seven crews in 30 months.
The Hilliard operation was the
only one that installed both the
fold-and-form HDPE and CIPP.
We installed liners in 26 states.
Because the Hilliard operation
had the CIPP wet out facility,
we served the entire CSR Hydro
Conduit company with CIPP
materials and installation expertise. Utilizing my knowledge of
processing fold-n-form HDPE
with steam, together with other
members of the National Liner
CIPP system, I drove the development of curing CIPP with
steam rather than hot water.
In 2001, I got a call from Jerry
Reynolds, the owner of Inliner Technologies, a technology

provider of CIPP liners, about
going to work for them. There
was still much awareness to be
gained for the CIPP process in
the United States at that time,
so I took the job. While there I
developed a patent on CIPP curing that is based on a time versus temperature relationship of
the curing process when curing
with steam. Inliner's support of
the R&D process allowed me to
show, through a series of experiments, that when using steam
in the manner that we were,
one could predict with reasonable certainty that the exotherm
would move from the A end to
the B end of the process, and
that the temperature seen at the
B end could be used to establish
the minimum time required for
a thorough curing of the liner.
This allowed us to avoid the nasty surprises of lifts (or non-hardened spots).
After Reynolds, I started my
own engineering firm to support the trenchless industry.
The first three or four years my
primary clients were Applied
Felts, a manufacturer of felt
and glass-reinforced liners,
and National Liner, a company
that supports CIPP contractors
across the United States and
Canada by providing liners, materials and technical support.
My experience goes way beyond CIPP, however. I was also
very interested in exploring cementitious lining of manholes.
AP/M Permaform, a manhole rehabilitation company, wanted to
expand their offerings through
the exploration of cementitious
lining of larger diameter pipes.
My firm was contracted to produce a design methodology they
could take to the engineering
community to demonstrate the
required wall thickness for this
technology. This, along with the
subsequent second generation
of the design of these rigid liner

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Underground Construction - May 2018

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