Inglewood gives its name to one of the most significant fault zones in Southern California. The Newport-Inglewood fault zone runs beneath this city and on down the coast through the South Bay and into Orange County, and it is the structure responsible for the destructive Long Beach earthquake of 1933. Fault-zone ground displaces, and a rigid sewer lateral with a bell joint every few feet cannot displace with it. On older laterals here we look specifically for sideways offsets at joints and cracks running across the pipe, rather than assuming every defect comes from corrosion or gradual soil movement.
The housing stock is substantially older than the postwar suburbs further south. A great deal of Inglewood was built between the 1910s and the 1940s, which puts cast iron and early vitrified clay under many of the city's streets. Cast iron of that age fails by closing in, as corrosion and mineral deposit accumulate on the wall until the whole house drains slowly and no amount of cabling produces lasting improvement. Descaling recovers the bore where sound iron remains, and the camera survey establishes whether it does.
The city sits beside the Baldwin Hills and the Inglewood Oil Field, an area with its own history of ground movement associated with extraction, and the 1963 failure of the Baldwin Hills Reservoir dam nearby is part of that local record. Ground that has moved unevenly in the past leaves rigid buried pipe out of alignment.
Postwar infill carries mid-century clay with some Orangeburg, and the mature street trees through the older neighbourhoods supply roots to any joint that has opened under the annual soil cycle.
Around Inglewood
We regularly work near:
- 📍SoFi Stadium
- 📍Kia Forum
- 📍Centinela Adobe
- 📍Edward Vincent Jr. Park
Main Sewer Line Cleaning in Inglewood — Local Notes
- •The Newport-Inglewood fault zone runs beneath the city and produced the destructive 1933 Long Beach earthquake
- •Ground displacement leaves sideways joint offsets and transverse cracks rather than lengthways separation
- •Much of the city was built from the 1910s to the 1940s, so cast iron and early clay are common
- •The adjacent Baldwin Hills and Inglewood Oil Field area has its own history of ground movement
- •Postwar infill carries mid-century clay and some Orangeburg with mature street trees supplying roots