Kennydale Lakeline Cleaning & Inspection

The City of Renton was needing a main sewer line cleaned, inspected, and remnants transported and disposed of. The big challenge of this project was that the line was five to twenty feet under water in Lake Washington. There was also the installation of coffer dams to install new pipe access points. Coffer dams are a unique environmental and engineering challenge to ensure the work crews will have a dry work area for the install. 

Customers: City of Renton, Tetra Tech Engineering and Ballard Marine

Services Performed:

• Vac Truck: Tank Cleaning, Sewer Line Jetting/Cleaning, Private Utility Locating
• CCTV: Closed Circuit Tele-Vision Pipe Inspection and Recording
• Tanker: Wastewater Transportation
  

As the City of Renton had to complete a competitive bid through their process on this project, no companies were willing to perform the work except for Bravo Environmental. This allowed Bravo to bypass bidding and allowed for time and material to ensure no surprise costs, leading to increased profit from this unique maintenance challenge. 

Infrastructure maintenance is mainly associated with land and water, and sometimes both. Infrastructure creates a foundation, which is always connected to the earth. This can present difficult challenges, especially if that infrastructure is underwater.

There are many challenges alone with infrastructure installation, maintenance, and cleaning. You add anything with water, you have other challenges besides the aquatic challenge and human lives at risk. You have immense safety training and costs, tools, insurance costs, equipment challenges and logistical challenges.

In this case, the work wasn’t off the mainland, it was on a barge on Lake Washington, creating more challenges. A Vac Truck can weigh twelve tons empty and up to twenty plus tons loaded, this is not to mention a CCTV camera van and tanks to capture the materials. 

As our employees are trained for over the water work, some employees had to be trained for underwater work. Working with the engineering and logistics of securing the trucks on the barge marks one of the most challenging projects for Bravo. 

With our project manager, operators and labors’ attention to safety, this project was done safely and efficiently. This illustrates the benefits of having environmental expertise tied to infrastructure maintenance labor, equipment, and expertise.