Fulton Street: Rehabilitating a 60-in. Sewer Under Live Rail
A 60-inch sewer under a live rail line, and no way to take it out of service
The 2022 Trenchless Technology Project of the Year, revisited: what made a corroded sanitary sewer beneath downtown Houston a hard problem, and how it was solved without closing the street above it.
A 60-inch sanitary sewer running beneath Fulton Street in downtown Houston had reached the stage every asset owner recognizes and nobody wants to reach: severe corrosion, cracking, voids and offset joints, in a line that could not be taken out of service and could not easily be dug up.
What sat above it was the constraint. Fulton Street carries a METRORail light rail line used by around 40,000 commuters a day. Open-cut replacement was not a realistic option; not on cost, and not on the disruption it would have imposed on a corridor the city depends on. The pipe still had to be rehabilitated, structurally, along its full length.
Work staged at grade on Fulton Street, alongside the METRORail corridor. The street, and the rail line, stayed open throughout.
The approach combined the Quadex Lining System with GeoKrete geopolymer, applied to rebuild the structural integrity of the host pipe from the inside. Flow was maintained throughout via an internal bypass, so the sewer continued to do its job while it was being repaired. The rail line above it ran on schedule for the duration.
GeoKrete mixing and application equipment staged above ground. Everything the crew needed sat at the surface; the pipe was rebuilt from the inside.
The work was recognized with the Trenchless Technology Project of the Year Award in the Rehabilitation category in September 2022.
GeoKrete mixing and application equipment staged above ground. Everything the crew needed sat at the surface; the pipe was rebuilt from the inside.
The technical interest in a project like this is not really the material. Geopolymer lining of large-diameter structures is well understood. It is the sequencing: how you stage bypass, access and application along a live line beneath a live transit corridor, with a defined window each day and no scope to overrun into it. That is a coordination problem before it is an engineering one.
“This project demonstrated an unprecedented level of communication and collaboration,” said Mike Vellano, CEO of Vortex Companies, at the time, “which was critical to the project’s success.” See Mike’s full commentary on YouTube.
“The technical interest is not really the material. It is the sequencing — a coordination problem before it is an engineering one.”
The crew on site. Staging bypass, access and application inside a fixed daily window was the job.
Four years on, it remains a useful reference for asset owners weighing rehabilitation against replacement on large-diameter lines in constrained urban corridors. The corridor stayed open. The pipe is still in service.
A City of Houston sanitary access point on Fulton Street, beside the METRORail tracks. Four years on, the line is still in service.
Project Recognition
Trenchless Technology Project of the Year, Rehabilitation category, 2022.
Client: City of Houston
