Main Sewer Line Cleaning in Bakersfield, CA

Bakersfield sits at the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley in a setting shaped by two extraction industries, oil and groundwater, and both have consequences for buried pipe. Groundwater overdraft has caused permanent land subsidence across the southern valley, measured by the state at substantial rates during the drought years and serious enough to damage canals and destroy well casings. Oil extraction in the Kern County fields has its own history of ground movement. Settlement that is permanent and uneven pulls a rigid sewer lateral out of grade, and unlike seasonal clay movement it does not reverse.

The ground is valley floor with dense clay and cemented hardpan layers. Hardpan sits at a fairly consistent depth, often around where a lateral runs, and generally has to be broken rather than dug, which makes excavation here slower and dearer than depth alone suggests. It also perches water above it rather than draining, so soil around a lateral can stay saturated long after rain.

This is seismically active country. The Kern County earthquake of July 1952, magnitude around 7.3, was one of the largest in California in the twentieth century, and an aftershock the following month caused serious damage in downtown Bakersfield itself. Ground motion of that order displaces buried pipe, and on surviving older laterals an offset joint may date from it, having quietly admitted roots and caught solids ever since.

The climate is extreme, with some of the hottest summers in the state and effectively no rain for half the year, giving a severe annual soil cycle. The housing runs from older central neighbourhoods on cast iron and early clay through substantial postwar expansion on mid-century clay and some Orangeburg to modern plastic in the newer suburbs.