Hydrojetting in Bellflower, CA

Bellflower publishes the make-up of its own collection system, and it is close to one material throughout. Of roughly 98 miles of sewer main, about 95 percent is eight-inch vitrified clay pipe, with the remainder in larger diameters. Clay is a good sewer material and a long-lived one. It is also jointed, and jointed clay is where roots find their way in.

That matters on a jetting call for a reason people rarely hear. When roots show up on your cable head, the intrusion could be in your lateral, or it could be at a bell in the main your lateral discharges into, and those two findings have completely different owners. The county's own preventive program on this system is root foaming plus, on the order of five hundred miles a year of camera inspection, ordered by which jurisdictions are producing spills. So a recent video record of the main in front of your house may already exist, and asking for it is free.

What we do with that is simple enough. The run gets filmed before any equipment is unloaded. We record how far into the intrusion it sits, and we tell you whether that distance falls within your property, out in your lateral under the pavement, or past the connection entirely. Jetting fixes what is inside your pipe. It does nothing about a bell in a public main, and a company that will not tell you which one you have is selling you a treatment for someone else's condition. One limit is shown in the figure above. Ninety-five percent describes the City's mains and says nothing about what your own lateral is made of, which is a separate question and one the camera answers on the day. What the figure does establish is the character of the system your line empties into: jointed along its whole length, and open at every one of those joints to anything looking for water.

Take the composition described above and follow it one step further. Clay is durable and chemically unbothered by what passes through it. That is why so much of it is still in service after this long. It is also jointed, and joints are precisely where fine roots find their way in. So your lateral discharges into a jointed system, and an intrusion has two plausible addresses that produce an identical symptom at your fixture: an opening in your own run, or a bell in the main it empties into.

Nothing about the water coming up in your yard tells you which. The camera does, and only if someone is calling distances as the head advances. Three outcomes result from that number, and they are not variations on a theme. Within your property line, the defect is yours, and the repair is a job you pay for. Out beneath the pavement, it is still yours, and it needs a city permit before anybody opens anything. At a joint in the main, it belongs to nobody in this conversation, and no quantity of pressure applied on your side of the connection will alter it.

So the measurement earns its place beside the clearing. A figure written on paper is something someone else can be held to; when the finding is out in the main, you leave with a record to put in front of the county rather than a description of an afternoon. When it is on your side, you are buying a repair for a defect that has been located instead of inferred. The clearing handles this month regardless. The number determines where the next payment should go, and it is taken as part of the same pass.