Alchatek Blog

Planners at Washington D.C.’s water utility, D.C. Water, decided to take proactive measures against potential flooding of their facility. Located right next to the Potomac, their facility could’ve been at risk in the event of an out-of-the-ordinary natural disaster. Determining that the main risk to the water supply in such a case would be permeation through sub-surface soil, they began installing a metal sheet pile wall deep into the substrate between the riverbank and the facility. However, in some spots they were not able to drive a sheet pile panel into the ground because of underground utility lines or rocky substrate. The planners called in LJS Waterproofing to create sub-surface grout walls in those spots to fill in the gaps.

Powerful Polymer

The LJS crew “constructed” these sections of the underground wall by injecting AP Fill 700. This is a single component, water-activated, hydrophobic, low viscosity, closed-cell polyurethane injection resin. This grout was used because it permeates the soil, fills small voids in the soil, and cuts off water flow.

Painless Procedure

LJS professionals used a Geoprobe to drive injection pipes into the ground (up to 33 feet in some locations). They then injected one gallon per foot using upward staging. The next injection point was 18 inches away from the first one. This process was repeated until a grout wall formed, filling the gap between the two adjacent underground sheet piles. For a large-scale job like this, LJS used the PolyShark single component grout pump.

Rapid Results

With solid, impermeable grout walls filling in the gaps, a sub-surface barrier between the riverbank and the drinking water facility was now in place. The planners at D.C. Water were very satisfied with this solution. LJS Waterproofing came through exactly in the way they had promised.

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The administrators of a church in Kingston, New York discovered water leaking through a wall into a hallway. The leak was located right next to the elevator. As water seeped into the elevator pit, it became flooded. Elevator pits often contain oil from hydraulic leaks in the equipment. Disposing of that oily water over and over can cost a property owner tens of thousands of dollars over time. The administrators reached out to LJS Waterproofing for assistance before the problem drove their budget through the roof.

Powerful Polymer

The LJS crew injected Spetec PUR F400 polyurethane grout to stop the water infiltration. This material reacts with the water inside the concrete cracks, curing to form an impenetrable seal. Chemical grouts are the most reliable way to shut down leaks in concrete.

Painless Procedure

1. Concrete crack injection with polyurethane resin is a five-step process:
2. Drill the injection holes.
3. Flush debris out of the holes with water.
4. Install the injection port.
5. Flush the crack with water.
6. Inject the resin.

For a complete overview of the crack injection process LJS professionals used on this job, see the Alchemy-Spetec blog post series 5 Steps of Concrete Crack Injection.

Rapid Result

The crew finished the repairs in a timely manner, saving the church a great deal of money in the process. The hallway is now completely dry and the elevator pit is no longer flooding. An ounce of prevention, in this case, was definitely worth a pound of cure!

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The owners of a valuable one-story house in New Jersey decided to add a second story to the structure. Unbeknownst to them (and to the contractor who worked on the project) four feet of the soil beneath the foundation had been poorly compacted by the home builder. When the second story was added, the soil could not support it and the foundation was critically damaged. The foundation issue caused the structure to shift a bit, which then caused roof damage as well.

When the contractor attempted to replace the roof, rainwater infiltrated the structure, eventually reaching the poorly compacted soil beneath the foundation and creating voids. These voids further destabilized the entire structure. Talk about a problem going from bad to worse! By this point, the residents had been forced out of their home for about a year! The general contractor then contacted LJS Waterproofing for assistance. A contractor in New Jersey with extensive soil and foundation stabilization experience, LJS quickly arrived on the scene and took immediate action to remedy the situation.

Powerful Polymer

The LJS crew used Alchemy-Spetec’s AP Fill 700 high-strength soil stabilization grout to solidify the four feet of poorly compacted soil beneath the foundation. This polyurethane resin was the ideal choice because of its ability to thoroughly permeate the soil and then cure to an incredibly high compressive strength. LJS used Alchemy-Spetec’s PolyShark grout pump to install the material. This pump is specifically designed for large-scale soil stabilization jobs.

Painless Procedure

The crew used a Geoprobe pipe driver to insert grout injection pipes four feet deep into the supporting soil around the house. AP Fill 700 was then injected to stabilize the soil. They also used a carbide drill bit to create small 3/8” drill holes in the concrete foundation slab in a diamond pattern, 4 feet on center. After each drill hole was created, the crew inserted a pipe through the slab and into the ground, pumping the grout to stabilize the soil and fill the voids.

Rapid Result

LJS completed stabilization of the entire foundation in just two weeks, ending a year-long cycle of compounding problems for the structure. This allowed the general contractor to repair the foundation, finish replacing the roof, and replace the damaged flooring with no further issues. Most importantly, the beleaguered residents were soon able to move back into their house after an exhausting, year-long ordeal.

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Aging infrastructure is a common problem in municipalities across North America. Wastewater treatment tanks with leaking cracks are a particularly serious problem because the result is often environmental contamination. Administrators at a wastewater treatment plant in New York City contracted LJS Waterproofing to repair 39 leaking concrete tanks. An experienced LJS crew arrived on the scene shortly thereafter, ready to take on this critical threat to the environment.

Powerful Polymer

The LJS crew injected Spetec PUR F400 to seal the leaking cracks. This material is a solvent and phthalate-free, water-reactive, hydrophobic, closed-cell, low viscosity, shrink-free, flexible, one-component polyurethane injection resin designed to shut off water leaks.

Painless Procedure

Concrete crack injection with polyurethane resin is a five-step process:

1. Drill the injection hole.
2. Flush debris out of the hole with water.
3. Install the injection port.
4. Flush the crack with water.
5. Inject the resin.

For a complete overview of the crack injection process LJS professionals used on this job, see the Alchemy-Spetec blog post series 5 Steps of Concrete Crack Injection.

Rapid Result

LJS Waterproofing sealed every leaking crack in all 39 concrete tanks, preventing any future wastewater from leaking into the surrounding environment. The administrators at the New York City wastewater treatment plant were extremely happy with the results.

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This article is an excerpt from Episode 13 of Alchemy-Spetec's podcast The Injection Connection, featuring Erin Rothman - Founder and CEO of StormSensor. (If you'd rather view or listen, an audio/visual version of this excerpt is posted at the bottom of the article.)

Charlie Lerman: Do you ever get involved with EPA Consent Decrees where they've said to a municipality, "Your system's all hosed up. You need to get this fixed and you're going to do it in this time frame." Did they ever call you in for that type of monitoring or anything like that?

Erin Rothman: The consent decree programs we've been a part of have been on the combined sewer side. And a lot of that is looking at obviously when overflow is happening, how significant the overflow is. We can quantify it given in tidal locations, so being able to separate different tidal sources or flow sources. But then, really, in doing that, helping them really understanding the total volume that needs to be addressed instead of the modeled volume and incorporating that into long-term control plans.

Charlie: Gotcha. Because a lot of municipalities, especially when they're slapped with a consent decree, just think, "We just need to increase the system capacity. We need to make it bigger. We need a bigger plan." Or something like that.

Erin: Yes, increase the budget to pay the fines.

Charlie: Right. And mitigation oftentimes is a great solution that helps or even gets them to where they need to be.

Erin: Exactly. And there are all different ways you can do it. It does not just mean increasing the size of the pipe and putting them over there.

Charlie: No. That's obviously where chemical grouting comes in. That's a small portion of how to control some things. And also with chemical grouting, you find saving opportunities just right there at the manhole. A lot of these people think, “We don't have a budget to start this” or “We don't even know where to start”. But there are some really simple things. When you look at a 10 gallon a minute leak in a manhole - that is roughly, depending what part of the country you're in, between about 12 to $25 000 a year in treatment costs. 

Erin: That's one leak.

Charlie: Right, one leak. And something like that is usually super easy to repair. We're talking a couple of thousand dollars, one day, one crew out there and they can immediately repair it. You see, that $3000 you paid to fix that manhole saves $25000 that year. It's very simple stuff and I really feel that we need some champions out there to get people to understand this. Maybe some type of push with our legislators. This is kind of a passion that I’ve found and it goes great with trying to be more environmentally friendly and saving money at the same time. Who's against this kind of thing? And I don't understand why we're not doing more of it.

Erin: Exactly and providing jobs for the people to do the maintenance and creating those repairs.

Alchemy-Spetec is pleased to announce the opening of a Western region manufacturing facility and grout lab in Reno, Nevada. Leak Seal and Geotech products are both currently stocked at this new location. Customers in the Western states will benefit from faster shipments. Alchemy-Spetec’s industry-leading tech support team will offer training programs and grout labs at the Reno location in the near future.

Vice President of Sales & Marketing Brian Oeder explains, “This effort is part of an ongoing commitment to providing easily accessible infrastructure repair products and technical training to contractors from coast to coast. We’re acutely aware of the tight deadlines our customers often face and we’re laser-focused on making sure our products and support expertise are always available.” President & CEO Stephen C. Barton adds, “Our new Reno facility is the latest step in our growth strategy. Serving customers on the West Coast by reducing transit time is our primary driver. We now have a one or two-day shipping point to the entire West Coast.”

For more information, contact:
Brian Oeder
VP Sales & Marketing
513-473-0062
boeder@alchemy-spetec.com

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This article is an excerpt from Episode 13 of Alchemy-Spetec's podcast The Injection Connection, featuring Erin Rothman - Founder and CEO of StormSensor. (If you'd rather view or listen, an audio/visual version of this excerpt is posted at the bottom of the article.)

Charlie Lerman: How did you get into this and how did you end up starting Storm Sensor? 

Erin Rothman: I think everyone's dream is to work in a sewer, so, of course, we start there! But I was a Vice President at a consulting company in Seattle, circa 2010-2011, and we brought in a stormwater group. For the first time in our company's history, we were losing money and we couldn't figure out why. When I talked to my stormwater team, they said that every time it rained at the office, they had to go out and sample their sites. Just because it was raining here doesn't mean it was raining there. So, they're going out like four times before they can collect a sample. And I said, "That's the silliest thing I’ve ever heard." Why don't we just have a rain gauge that texts us when it rains? And they said, why don't you go invent that? And I said, I will, I'm going to call it StormSensor. That's how it started as a little sparkle in my eye, but I had no hardware or software experience at the time. And I didn't know if I could even begin to put together a company like that. But as I started talking to more people in the stormwater industry and learned that there was a lot of frustration - and so much of it related to not knowing what was going on within these systems, I realized that maybe I could solve this problem with a team of brilliant people who could actually build the things that were in my head. That's how it started.

Charlie: That’s spectacular.

Erin: Yeah, I started with construction and industrial compliance because that was my background. And I started talking to cities and so many of them said they just needed to know how much water was moving through their storm system. That it wasn't metered and they didn't know. That just opened up a world of opportunity to me.

Charlie: Wow! That’s excellent. When you deal with below-grade infrastructure, there are a lot of needs but they're not really well defined. Nobody even focuses on them because it's out of sight out of mind. And I often say even for grouting, Alchemy-Spetec's biggest competitor is not another grout company - it's ignorance. People just don't understand that this kind of technology, these types of repairs (or your monitoring system) are even out there. And I think that's because municipalities are on tight budgets obviously. We want them that way, we don't want to just throw money at them. We want them to use the funds correctly. But you get a lot of people who start off at low-level positions in municipalities and then there's turnover, they move up, they go on to other things. And a lot of information is lost there. So, it's not necessarily that the government's just bad. It's kind of the nature of it, we all want to grow in our careers but these things get left behind.

Erin: Absolutely. And then the people paying for it, the citizens and taxpayers, want to see the benefit of what they're spending their money on. If you can't see it, then why would you pay for something that you can't see, that you can't understand? If you wait to fix it is once it stops working, it's too late because you're dealing with flooding and backups and paying too much for treatment and everything else.

Charlie: Oddly enough, it’s going back to that study I mentioned earlier in this interview, the 188 million dollars for I&I repairs - paying that is actually the easy part of it. What it comes down to is that inflow also causes damage to infrastructure. You see sinkholes and damage to property, potentially harmful or life-threatening conditions. And then, when these systems overflow, you're putting septic out there in the public, damaging our waterways and our health.

Erin: Yes, and sometimes even our homes and our businesses and the people who live and/or work there. It's becoming a lot more common.

View the video version of this excerpt...

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This article is an excerpt from Episode 13 of Alchemy-Spetec's podcast The Injection Connection, featuring Erin Rothman - Founder and CEO of StormSensor. (If you'd rather view or listen, an audio/visual version of this excerpt is posted at the bottom of the article.)

Charlie Lerman: Have you ever found or identified anything that’s just an anomaly, something that's completely unexpected that you surprised the city with, or anything like that?

Erin Rothman: Once or twice, yes. One example was in Memphis. We were working as part of a larger group to do a model validation study for the storm system because Memphis was dealing with a lot of flooding. And most model validation studies have sensors that are deployed in a limited number of locations and for a very short period of time - one to three months usually. We were deployed for about six months before we got a call claiming that all of our sensors were broken because we were reading four feet of depth, four feet of water in all of the pipes. And that it was flowing backward, and all that was impossible. This is why whoever was running the project didn't like new technology.

But we're thinking like, for every sensor to show this, there's got to be something. I mean, we've never seen it with even one sensor, but if the whole thing's acting up... So, we called the city and they had no idea what was going on. We asked them to go check it out and they came back and said, "Oh, my gosh, there is four feet of water in these pipes and it's flowing backward!" What could possibly be going on? So, they talked to the guys at the plant on the Mississippi River and they said, "Oh, yeah, every time the river hits a certain stage, we open up the gates and then use the storm system for storage." But you're telling me that it goes more than a mile into the system.

So, what we had is a situation where no one really understood that the river was filling the storm system and taking up at least half the capacity on a pretty regular basis. So, when you combine heavy rain and high-water levels, all of which are going into a storm system that is designed to hold only rainwater, you have some pretty significant flooding impacts. Now, what they do is before a storm comes, they close the gates, empty out the storm system, and clear that out.

This article is an excerpt from Episode 13 of Alchemy-Spetec's podcast The Injection Connection, featuring Erin Rothman - Founder and CEO of StormSensor. (If you'd rather view or listen, an audio/visual version of this excerpt is posted at the bottom of the article.)

Charlie Lerman: So, Erin, first off, let's talk about what StormSensor does.

Erin Rothman: Generally, we work with cities across the country to help them understand how much water moves through their storm sewer and coastal systems. We're deployed in every region of the United States. We are in sanitary systems, combined systems, and storm systems. And now we're also looking above ground. We're basically monitoring the volume of water that's moving through these systems and then combining that data with climate information to identify trends that may be tied to storm events versus those that are related more to groundwater or other I&I issues.

Charlie: So, ideally then, you're gaining real-time data detailing what's going on in your system rather than just some snapshot stuff?

Erin: Exactly. We typically deploy for a minimum of a year. Pretty dense resolution networks. Some are installed at almost every junction. These systems are so variable that understanding what's happening between them can give you an idea of where you can target specific mitigation actions.

Episode 13 of The Injection Connection: Who budgets $188 million annually to treat groundwater? The state of Tennessee does, not that they want to. A 2014 study (Kurz I/I Survey) found that roughly 45% of the water treated from their collection system was from inflow. But the treatment costs are just part of the issue. Inflow can and often does wash fines into the collection system. This has many effects. One, reduced system capacity due to these soils sitting in the pipes. Two, potential sinkholes from the loss of soils over time. A third impact is the increased wear and tear on the system, especially lift station pumps. Lastly, and the easiest to see is sanitary overflows and backups that pollute the environment and can damage property. So, with such a clear issue that obviously needs addressing, why isn’t it being addressed? In this episode, Charlie Lerman discusses these issues with Erin Rothman, the CEO & Founder of StormSensor.

Watch the episode in its entirety below, or check it out on TheInjectionConnection.com and the following platforms:

• Spotify
• Apple Podcasts
• SoundCloud
• Google Podcasts
• YouTube

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