Main Sewer Line Cleaning in Long Beach, CA

Long Beach has a sewer history unlike anywhere else in the state, because this city experienced some of the most dramatic ground subsidence ever recorded in an urban area. Extraction from the Wilmington Oil Field, discovered in 1932, caused the land around the harbour and Terminal Island to sink by something approaching thirty feet at the centre of the bowl before water injection was begun in the late 1950s to arrest it. Buried infrastructure in the affected area was comprehensively damaged, and ground that has settled that unevenly leaves a legacy for any rigid pipe spanning it.

The subsidence has been stabilised for decades, so this is a historical rather than an ongoing cause, but it is part of why older laterals in and around the harbour districts show offsets and lost grade that are difficult to attribute to ordinary soil movement. Where we find a line that has clearly been pulled out of alignment rather than gradually corroded, local ground history is often the explanation.

The wider city carries a very wide range of housing eras. The downtown, Belmont Shore, Bixby Knolls and the older districts hold housing from the 1900s through the 1930s on cast iron and early vitrified clay, where loss of bore to scale and corrosion is the dominant finding. The postwar neighbourhoods carry mid-century clay and in places Orangeburg, failing at the joints. Newer infill carries plastic.

Coastal position adds corrosion pressure: a saline water table nearer the shoreline and the harbour is harder on cast iron than inland conditions, acting on exactly the pipes that are already the oldest in the city.