Ninth Street pipe work an inside job

By JEAN HELLER

© St. Petersburg Times, published April 30, 2000

ST. PETERSBURG -- Sorry Jessie and I had to take off on you last week. It won't happen often. But we learned some interesting things on the brief hiatus.

Well, interesting and scary. You might want to steer clear of Dr. M.L. King (Ninth) Street for a week or so. What will be going on beneath the pavement is the stuff of nightmares.

And it seems so innocuous to look at. Barriers are sprinkled liberally along the street from 22nd Ave. N to Ninth Avenue N. Four lanes are squeezed down to two, and driving south is more like skiing a slalom course.

St. Petersburg utilities department contractors are digging five large pits on the west side of MLK, the preliminary step of fixing about 4,000 feet of water pipe that has been leaking at the joints, which need to be resealed. The leaking has eroded soil beneath MLK and caused the street to sag in several places.

What is awesome is how the leaks will be fixed. From the inside. By a real live human being who is going to crawl along inside the pipe and put new seals in the joints. And this pipe is only 24 inches in diameter.

"I want to meet this person myself," said Jerry Morrone, public utilities engineer. "The contractor has been doing this work for 20 years, and they tell us they can send someone through a pipe only 18 inches in diameter. It must be a woman or a very small man. I don't even like to think about it."

Think MRI.

Now think of an MRI 600 feet long.

Feel your heart rate rising? Your palms sweating?

Is there really someone so not claustrophobic that he or she could stand being inside a pipe the width of a standard computer keyboard?

"The pits we're digging provide five access points to a total of about 4,000 feet of pipe," Morrone said. "The person will crawl inside and lie on a rolling platform, like you use for working under cars, only smaller. I think there probably is a rope attached, too.

"He will clean around the joint and then apply the bond, make sure it adheres and make sure it can withstand the pressure of the water running through. There are about 250 joints in all that need to be repaired."

The worker's air supply will come from either end of the pipe. The longest pipe section is 600 feet so, Morrone said, he will never be more than 300 feet from escape.

Well, isn't that a comfort!

In all, the work will take 11 days.

"The lane blockages and changes won't stay as bad as they are now," Morrone said. "As one section of pipe is completed, we'll fill in the pit and restore the road.

Asked whether he knew why somebody would be willing to spend a day jammed inside a water pipe like byproduct in a sausage casing, Morrone replied:

"I was thinking about that the other day, wondering if I would ever do it. Maybe when I was a crazy teenager. It's probably a job worth a lot of money. That's the only thing I can think of. It's very much a specialty form of work. Only a few people in the country do it."

A factoid that certainly comes as no surprise to me, and especially not to Jessie, who doesn't even like to get in her crate.

We got an e-mail from Shirley Franklin of St. Petersburg a while ago about a problem she was seeing in one of our least-favorite intersections, 28th Street N at Roosevelt Boulevard. Franklin complained that westbound traffic on Roosevelt turning right onto 28th Street into Carillon didn't even slow down for traffic coming straight across Roosevelt.

Well, we go by that intersection at least twice a day, snarling and fuming most of the time over left-turning traffic oblivious to red lights. We hadn't noticed what was going on at the entrance to Carillon.

So we watched for a couple of weeks, and kept notes. While we were waiting on westbound Roosevelt at a succession of red lights over 12 weekdays, we watched traffic making the long curving right turn into Carillon.

We counted 51 turning cars during that period. Of the 51, 43 drivers at least looked back to see whether there was oncoming traffic from 28th Street south of Roosevelt. Eight didn't bother. Of the total of 51, only 11 showed brake lights, meaning 40 drivers didn't slow down at all for oncoming traffic or at least didn't brake.

Yet there is a yield sign for the turning traffic right out there in the open.

Franklin said she would like to see turning traffic stopped when the light is green for northbound 28th Street traffic, but that shouldn't be necessary if people would just obey the signage that's already there.

Of course, that was Franklin's point.

They don't.

Now a word of warning. The St. Petersburg Police Department is going to be out in force Friday, patrolling U.S. 19 from 54th Avenue S to 38th Avenue N with an eye to ticketing aggressive drivers, those who tailgate, make improper lane changes and speed. It's part of a countywide effort involving at least a half-dozen police agencies.

Now don't write to me asking why I'm warning people about this. The police want people to know.

"We want to educate people to drive safely, which is always better than sending an officer out to write a ticket," said Lt. Randy Bratton, director of the St. Petersburg Police traffic division. "Besides, believe it or not, whether people know we're watching or not, they're going to do what they're going to do, anyway."

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