Main Sewer Line Cleaning in San Bernardino, CA

San Bernardino is among the oldest settlements in inland Southern California, and the housing around its historic downtown runs from the 1880s through the 1920s. Those laterals are cast iron and early vitrified clay, frequently original, and in this city the water chemistry has been working on them for a century. The groundwater beneath the San Bernardino basin is mineral-rich, and combined with imported supply it produces some of the hardest water in the state. Cast iron here accumulates scale and corrosion crust on the pipe wall faster than almost anywhere, and descaling is accordingly one of our busiest services in the city.

The ground is alluvial fan material washed down out of the San Bernardino Mountains, so it is coarser and more granular than the dense clays further south in the valley, with cobbles that make excavation awkward. Granular ground means less of the extreme shrink and swell joint separation, and more straightforward corrosion and root-driven failure.

This city sits in one of the most seismically active settings in California, crossed by both the San Andreas and the San Jacinto fault zones, with the San Andreas running along the base of the mountains just north of town. Parts of the valley floor also have shallow groundwater and are mapped for liquefaction potential. Ground displacement is therefore a real item on the list of possible causes here, and on older laterals we look specifically for sideways offsets at joints and cracks running across the pipe, which are the signatures of motion rather than of gradual soil movement.

Postwar tracts around the core carry mid-century clay with Orangeburg in places, following the usual pattern of opened joints and root entry.