HomeCase Studies5-Story Library

The staff of a historic, urban, public library can rest easy now that Blueline has been applied to its aged and failing sanitary drain system. After a series of leaks and costly damage to some books, this 5-story library knew it needed an effective, long-term pipe rehabilitation solution to prevent further damage and disruption.

Project: Rehabilitate failing sanitary drain lines that are located in hard-to-access areas throughout a high-traffic, downtown library.

Customer and Site: A 5-story, historic, public library, located in a heavily populated, urban area. This particular downtown library is part of a library system that serves more than a million residents and contains millions of books.

System: Cast iron sanitary sewer lines that are 50.8mm, 76.2mm and 101.6mm in diameter. These pipes are around 60 years old and are located in ceilings, walls and under concrete slab.

Problem: These sanitary pipes experienced leaks as a result of age, which prompted the customer to look for long-term solutions to prevent damage to the library’s books and other documents. Since the drain pipe system is located throughout the library’s walls, ceilings and floors, an in-situ pipe system repair seemed ideal.

Circumvention: If the customer had chosen a traditional re pipe repair, the ceilings, walls and slab would have been ripped apart in order to replace the failing pipes. This would have caused severe disruption to the library’s normal operations and it would have been a time-consuming, inconvenient and messy project.

Solution:Blueline was used to rehabilitate the leaking sanitary lines and prevent failures from occurring in the future. Nu Flow’s non-invasive, patented process was the best solution for the customer because the library remained open and the restrooms were available for use during our work.

Nuflow’s Pull-in-Place liner was installed using existing access points, to reduce any disruption to the library structure, staff and visitors. This patented, in-place process preserved many structures within the library, which in turn saved the customer money, time and hassle. Along with those benefits, the library’s drain system is now protected with Blueline, which is a long-term solution against leaks and other common failures for several mechanical pipe systems within all types of commercial, municipal and federal buildings.
Pipe relining in library, saving time and money!

“This library is a historic building, so it can’t be torn down and construction must be at a bare minimum. Our technicians rehabilitated the drain pipes in-place and now they are safe for continued use.”

-Paul Silveira, Project Manager,
Nuflow