January 22, 2020 The North Area Force Mains
The city of Broomfield is starting construction of what’s called a “Force Main”, a waste water line that’s pumped instead of using simple gravity flow. This pipeline will be about 7 miles long and the total project cost is about $9 million. There’s almost nothing on the web about this, but when a lot of trucks with truly large pipes start unloading, one’s curiosity gets excited! The City Council meeting minutes approving the project are here.
About the 5th truck load of the big pipes parked and ready to unload
They are indeed large!
Rather than bring in an off-road fork lift, it’s more efficient to just put forks onto the excavator that will be doing some of the earth moving.
From straight in front, this looks like something out of the Heavy Metal movie!
These are 24” thick wall PVC pipes, type C900 DR25, from Diamond pipe company. The technical details are here. Each piece weighs 1,106 pounds.
Unloading a pallet of pipes.
This is what 3,600 feet of 24” pipe looks like! This is ten truck loads, enough to get to the first road cut. The pipe will be staged along the route, so this is about as much as you’ll see in one place.