Work to replace old Costa Mesa sewer pipe likely to cause traffic delays
Costa Mesa Sanitary District officials are warning drivers to expect traffic delays around the intersection of Wilson Street and Harbor Boulevard starting later this month as workers begin replacing a 60-year-old sewer pipe in the area.
Work on the project will start Sept. 26 and is expected to take about four weeks.
It is expected to close one eastbound lane on Wilson, near Harbor, according to sanitary district General Manager Scott Carroll.
The district doesn’t anticipate having to block any traffic on Harbor, he said.
Most of the work will take place during the evening.
About 460 feet of pipe need to be replaced, Carroll said.
Officials say the pressurized cast-iron pipe in place now is a vital piece of sewer infrastructure. It handles one of the heaviest flows of any line in the sanitary district’s system — delivering more than 600,000 gallons of wastewater per day to a treatment plant in Fountain Valley.
The new pipe will be made of high-density polyethylene, a corrosion-resistant plastic material expected to last at least 100 years.
“We’re getting out of the iron pipe business because they corrode and are not very dependable after a certain amount of years,” Carroll said.
The district estimates replacing the pipe will cost $273,000.
Because the project is at one of Costa Mesa’s busier intersections, officials plan to use a method called horizontal directional drilling to install it, rather than digging a trench.
The tactic uses a drilling rig launched from the surface to carve out an underground path for the new pipe.
The method is useful because it doesn’t have the same effects on the surface as digging a trench would, officials say. The latter approach probably would take months to complete.
This will be the first time the district has used horizontal directional drilling to lay new pipe, though Carroll said workers previously used other methods that didn’t involve extensive digging.
“We definitely wanted to use a method that’s less disruptive and gets us in and out as quickly as possible,” Carroll said.
The sanitary district provides sewer and curbside trash collection services to about 116,700 ratepayers in Costa Mesa, parts of Newport Beach and unincorporated sections of Orange County.
For more information on the project, visit cmsdca.gov.
Twitter: @LukeMMoney
