Sewer Pipe Lining in Texas

What is in the ground in Texas

The median Texas home dates from around 1990, among the youngest in the country, and the sewer work follows a specific pattern anyway. The pre-war cores of Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Fort Worth, Austin, Galveston and El Paso drain through vitrified clay laid in short sections with a mortar joint at each bell, and cast iron under the raised houses of the Heights and the older neighborhoods. The vast postwar and 1960s-70s expansion of every Texas metro went up on monolithic concrete slabs with cast iron branch drains cast into the fill beneath them, and cast iron under a Texas slab is the state's defining sewer failure: the slab heaves and settles with the clay, the pipe cracks or separates at a joint, the leak softens the soil under the floor and the movement gets worse, until the symptom is a slow drain, a sewer smell or a crack in the slab itself. The lateral from the house to the street in those tracts is clay or, in some areas, Orangeburg; after the mid-1970s it is PVC, which fails by geometry, a belly or a pulled joint where the ground moved.

Soil, water and weather

The clay is the story. Houston and the Gulf Coast sit on the Beaumont clay, Dallas-Fort Worth on the Blackland Prairie's and Eagle Ford's expansive clays, San Antonio and Austin on the Blackland and the edge of the Hill Country's limestone, and all of it swells enormously after a wet spring and shrinks hard through a Texas August, in a cycle that cracks foundations across every metro and bends, shears and opens sewer pipe the same way. Houston adds subsidence from groundwater withdrawal, a water table close to the surface, hurricane-season flooding and a salt-laden coastal air that corrodes cast iron fast; its laterals are shallow, wet and moving. The Hill Country and West Texas add limestone and caliche that make a trench a hammer job. There is little frost to speak of outside the Panhandle. Houston Public Works, Dallas Water Utilities and San Antonio Water System have all operated under federal consent decrees on sanitary sewer overflows driven in large part by inflow and infiltration, and they inspect lateral connections closely. Live oaks, pecans, hackberries, elms and the ubiquitous Arizona ash fill any leaking joint they find, and in a drought year they go looking.

What shows up on Texas camera inspections

• Cast iron under 1950s-70s slabs cracked or separated by slab movement and corroded along the bottom, the state's defining sewer failure
• Bellies, offsets and sheared joints from expansive Blackland and Beaumont clay heaving and shrinking under every metro
• Shallow, wet laterals in Houston moving with subsidence and flooding in hurricane season
• Roots from live oaks, pecans, hackberries and Arizona ash in the joints of pre-1940 clay laterals and any leaking plastic fitting
• Limestone and caliche in the Hill Country and West Texas that turn a trench into a hammer job
• Consent-decree utilities inspecting lateral connections closely and rejecting ones that leak

Which trenchless method fits

The camera decides. A line that still holds its shape is a lining job; a line that has been crushed, has lost its slope or has collapsed is a replacement job; a single bad joint in an otherwise sound run is a spot repair. Here is what each one does and where it stops being the right tool.

Who owns the pipe, and who issues the permit

In Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Austin, Fort Worth and most Texas cities ownership and upkeep of the sewer lateral sit with the property owner service line from the building to its connection with the public main, including the portion in the right-of-way; the utilities set standards for the connection and the Texas State Board of Plumbing Examiners' licensing applies to the work, which must be done by or under a licensed plumber. A plumbing permit from the city covers the private side; opening a pit in the right-of-way means a street-cut or right-of-way permit as well from public works; and Texas 811 must be notified before any excavation. Many Texas municipal utility districts and homeowners associations own the mains under private streets and have their own rules. Most utilities allow a lined lateral where video of the connection is supplied. Because the expense of a Texas repair is the slab and not the yard, descaling and lining or coating the cast iron from an interior cleanout or a roof vent, which leaves the floor intact, changes the economics of the job entirely.

Lining crews in Texas

Lining, bursting and spot repairs in Texas are performed by Texas trenchless crews at CPC Trenchless, covering Houston, the Gulf Coast and projects across Texas. They are listed in the CIPP Verified Installer directory, which means licensing, completed work and lining equipment were checked before the listing went live.

Estimates are free. Call now. (855) 804-1434

Where lining is in demand across Texas

The pipe problems described above are concentrated in the older cities and the postwar suburbs around them. The communities below are the ones Texas property owners ask about most, and the same methods apply everywhere in between.

A straight answer about your Texas sewer line

On a Texas line the camera's first job is to measure how far the clay has moved the pipe, because a liner cures to the shape it finds and a belly stays a belly. Scaled cast iron that still holds its shape descales and lines beautifully; a sheared joint under the slab does not, however good the liner. The inspection pins each fault to a spot on the ground and a depth, and you keep the footage. The written scope names the method, the footage under the slab and out to the street, the price and the reasons the alternatives were set aside.

Estimates are free. Call now. (855) 804-1434