City of Toronto’s Largest Water Treatment Plant Chooses Empipe to Restore Pipes with NoDig Technology

The RC Harris Treatment Plant is one of four City water treatment plants that service the City of Toronto. The plant takes raw water from Lake Ontario, then cleans, disinfects and converts it into safe potable/drinking water for pumping into the City’s distribution system.
Located at the foot of Victoria Park Ave. and constructed in the 1930s, it is Toronto’s largest water treatment facility. Operating 365 days a year RC Harris produces 168,000 million liters of water. It was declared a national historic civil engineering site in 1992 and was named for Rowland Caldwell Harris, Commissioner of Works from 1912 to his death in 1945.

The project was completed with Empipe Solutions, a licensee of the Formadrain and Oliner systems, for the City of Toronto. It involved several stacks that were leaking and had to be repaired. As the plant is a historic site, damage to the infrastructure was unacceptable. In short, breaking the walls was not a viable solution.

Formadrain was the perfect solution because it is a STRUCTURAL liner. Lining a vertical stack is a delicate, precise procedure because the pipe is not “held in place” by the ground, as it were. The installation also has to be done through a cleanout and many systems do not have the capability of doing this, because the liner has to be structural. And Formadrain is.

Project Details:

There were some interesting challenges on this project, to say the least. For one, the cleanouts for the stacks we had to repair were in the building attic, about a half dozen floors up from street level. We had to run hoses through another stack from the roof and then attached them to the bladder inside the stack under repair as there were absolutely no windows in the attic. This went off without a hitch.

We also had to work fast because the attic was extremely hot (the outside temperature exceeded 90 degrees Fahrenheit) and our unique, proven steam curing process really came into its own at this point.

The Formadrain resin has a 4 hour working time before it starts to harden, and this combined with our completely predictable steam curing process (liner will cure in approximately 35 minutes) provides total control on the job.

Prior to being able to fill the bladder with steam however, we first had to blow it up with air, as the liner was vertical, to offset the effects of gravity. This was necessary because when the resin is hot it can slide down the liner and get out of position. So we started with air and then followed up with steam, and were thus able to complete the project successfully.

Another challenge was the handling of the materials as even the slightest damage to the building, which was a historic site, was unacceptable.

The stacks were completely rehabilitated within two days and the project was a success.