Highway 1 culvert upgrade from 48 inches to 108 inches using pipe swallowing technique

摘要

Throughout North America, culverts that were installed long ago to keep highways and railroads safe from damaging water have passed, or are approaching the limits of their rated useful life. In addition to these urgent replacement concerns, many of the culverts installed in more recent years have either proven inadequate in flow capacity or are predicted to become inadequate by modern infrastructure analyses that include worst-case “100 year rain events.”In the case study provided, an existing 48-inch-diameter culvert on State Route1 had not been keeping up with storm water runoff, threatening road integrity and public safety. The culvert was upgraded to 108-inch-diameter casing in a technique called pipe swallowing using a 34-inch pipe ramming tool. (Figure 1)No technique other than open cut was practicable for this jurisdiction, which has the most restrictive environmental and occupational regulatory guidelines in the U.S. The use of the world’s largest ramming hammer and the technique of pipe swallowing allowed the highly valued West Coast passage to remain open throughout the upgrade project.