Where life interacts with infrastructure.
Nu Flow Preserves Downtown San Diego Trolley Tracks Root intrusion is extremely common for sewer laterals running outside of buildings to the city mains. If your property is experiencing reduced flow from its drains, root intrusion could be the perpetrator. Nu Flow’s innovative main rehabilitation system uses in-place technology to prevent destruction and disruption, keeping the project’s work behind-the-scenes. Project: Use the Nu Main system to rehabilitate a failing sewer lateral without causing disruption to the trolley station and tracks above it. Customer and Site: The Westgate Hotel is a landmark luxury hotel with antique decor, located in Downtown San Diego, California. Built in 1970, this one-of-a-kind hotel has 19 floors and 223 guest rooms. System: The 10" diameter cast iron and clay sanitary lateral that takes all the waste from the hotel to the city main. This 44-year-old main is suspended 12 feet in the air, running along the ceiling of the hotel’s basement’s main laundry room. The pipe goes through the hotel’s foundation wall and runs beneath city sidewalks, the nearby Civic Center Trolley Station and its trolley tracks. Problem: More than 40 years of pipe deterioration due to age and natural ground shifting caused the clay and cast iron lateral’s joints to fail. This allowed nearby Ficus trees’ roots to enter the pipe system, grow rapidly and create blockages (root intrusion), causing backups for the hotel’s sewer main. Maintenance on the pipe included routine Vactor jetting for the past 15 years, but the customer finally decided to find an effective, long-term solution. The failed joints are directly below the adjacent trolley station and its double set of tracks, so excavation is not feasible. Circumvention: If the customer had not chosen Nu Flow’s technology, there would not be many choices left for the customer. A repipe would include having to dig up the trolley station and tracks that lay above the lateral. To get that type of excavation approved by the city would be an enormous, tedious and very expensive feat. If approved, the trolley’s downtown stops would be severely inconvenienced, most likely causing service disruptions for the busy transportation system. An in-situ solution was definitely more palatable. Solution: First, the building’s main was cleaned and brought back to its original diameter using Nu Flow’s proprietary cutting tools. The roots inside the 10" diameter pipe were cut and flushed out, using existing access points. Effluent was diverted and bypassed to allow liner installation. Then, the Nu Main system was carefully installed in the underground pipe line from the hotel to the trolley tracks. An epoxy-saturated felt liner was inserted into the lateral using a patented Pull-in-Place process. The liner cured to form a protective, seamless structural liner that covers all breaches in pipe and will serve as a long-term solution against root intrusion, backups and other common drain failures.
“In my opinion, the work performed by Nu Flow to achieve the lining of this very important pipe is priceless. They worked very efficiently and knew exactly what they were doing. I had never watched the lining process before and I am a total believer now.” - Mike O. Ryan, Chief Engineer, The Westgate Hotel
Nu Flow’s innovative solution prevented the busy downtown sidewalk and neighboring trolley station’s tracks from being excavated, while also greatly extending the useful life of the hotel’s drain main. There was absolutely no destruction or disruption to the hotel sewer service, trolley station or nearby areas for a fraction of the cost of a traditional excavation.
p/n 687 v1.1
North America: 1-800-834-9597 | International: 1-905-433-5510 info@nuflowtech.com | www.nuflowtech.com