TollandRCR wrote:Some Southern cities permitted the use of paper mains to connect residences to the street main (they did not call them "paper"). I wonder if any of the troublesome mains in Jackson could be paper.
Our big lead scare a few months ago was because the joints of the residential feeds was soldered with lead at the joints connecting them to the city mains and the pipes were corroding to the point they were leaching the lead solder.
Our biggest problem here, besides the FUBAR water dept and ancient infrastructure is the Yazoo clay we have to deal with. When it's dry, it's as hard as a rock (people actually make pottery out of it) but when it's saturated, it can expand 30% or more. The constant shrinking and expanding breaks the pipes, the roads, the foundations on houses, my brother's sliding glass door...My neighbor has a vein of it running through her yard and it shifted the bottom half of her driveway over about 8". Big crack all the way across it one day and about 2 weeks later the whole bottom had scooted over to the left without adding any more cracks. Sink holes are also a huge problem here due to the soil issues. It is interesting, in a detached sort of way, to watch sink holes develop over a period of days, from a small pothole, to something that will take out your front end, to a water-filled hole surrounded by barricades. One street I drive on to get to the studio runs along the river and foot-deep potholes literally develop overnight. Like huge chunks of asphalt just disappear into thin air.
They are rebuilding the interstate south of I-20 that was already completely rebuilt about 20 years ago because it was not only partially built on Yazoo clay, but the clay they did bother to dig out they just dumped to the side, so when they rebuilt the frontage roads, they were on double the usual amount of clay. They started the initial rebuild about 10 years ago, got half of it done and had to start over after doing nothing with it for 2 years while they reassessed and re-engineered the plans. It's still a construction zone all these years later.
As for the paper mains, we do have something that looks like heavy tarpaper composite looking stuff pipes in our system in some parts of town. They dug up a chunk of it in front of our building downtown (oldest part of town) when they were jetting the storm drain out.