The City of Fort Lauderdale in Florida, USA, recently incurred a series of breaks along one of its ageing sewer transmission lines. The result, a spill of over 200 million gallons (900+ million litres) of sewage into the city’s waterways, was an issue naturally requiring immediate attention, with a $65M USD project awarded and fast tracked for the installation of a new 7 mile (11.2km) HDPE pipeline.
The new force main acts as a redundant line for the city’s sewage handling, holding a flow capacity of 64 million gallons (290 million litres). With such a large volume of HDPE pipe installed in a downtown environment, the project was arguably one of the most unique and largest of its kind anywhere in the world.
Operating in a suburban environment created an incredible series of challenges for both machinery and engineers. The 48″ and 54″ HDPE pipe needing 17 large directional drills to complete. Intricacies included installation of the sewage main across two canals, an intercoastal waterway and several major county and FDOT roadways. Given the nature and requirements of the project, approximately 91% of the pipeline was established using trenchless technology.
Such a large scale project needed top of the range polyethylene pipe welding machinery. A number of Worldpoly fusion welding machines were deployed on the project with excellent results. These included the Worldpoly1600 Hydra HF and Worldpoly63 HF (pictured below).
