Big water pipes

A news item about a large cracked water pipe caught my eye this morning - Half Moon Lane in SE24 - which runs between Herne Hill and North Dulwich railway stations - and I wanted more. What would a large water pipe - 36 inch diameter - look like and how would you go about installing one?

Finding out about big water mains proved quite difficult. Bing and Google turned up lots of stuff about connecting up houses and housing estates, but very little big about water mains. But then I got some images of what appeared to be concrete mains water pipes in the US. And then I turned up the installation guide at reference 2, from the Irish pipeline company at reference 1.

The installation guide was for ductile steel pipes with diameters up to one metre: presumably ductile steel does not crack under stress quite as easily as cast iron. Very few glossy pictures, but lots of stuff about how you would go about installing a pipe of this sort. I now know, for example, that a certain amount of movement is allowed in a gasket joint (a flange joint is rigid), that you might want to wrap the whole pipe in a plastic sleeve and that the pipe should rest on its barrels rather than on its joints.

But I did not find out much about keeping the inside of the pipe clean during installation and what you might do to clean it out after installation. Or about how you might go about mending one: is mending possible? Is the only option taking out whole sections of pipe and replacing them? Given that these pipes are rigid, having cut out the old section, how would you insert a new section into an existing pipeline? Do it in two pieces with a welded sleeve over the join?

Clearly something one could hold forth about in TB. Once home to at least one water board engineer.

PS: while over breakfast there was more watery news from a recent number of the Surrey & Epsom Comet. Watery news about oil spills - one of 4,000 litres of oil of some kind - presumably from some tank which started leaking in the silent hours - from Thornton Heath bus garage - into the River Wandle. Which, according to Harrrison Galliven of the Local Democracy Reporting Service 'is one of the world's purest chalk streams and home to many unique species'. Which, given that the visible part of the river runs north through urban south London to the Thames, seems like a rather extravagant claim. Was the text on the page actually knocked out by ChatGDT?

References

Reference 1: https://www.total-pipeline.com/. 'Ireland's leading independent distributor of engineering materials and solutions to the multi-utility, infrastructure and construction sectors'.

Reference 2: https://www.total-pipeline.com/media/1203/di-installation-guide.pdf.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Democracy_Reporting_Service.

Reference 4: https://www.bbc.co.uk/lnp/ldrs. 'The Local Democracy Reporting Service created up to 165 new journalism jobs to help fill a gap in the reporting of local democracy issues across the UK'.

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_Wandle.