Meeting Transcript

Hello everyone. So we are out here today at Forest Park to talk about the Taylor Run Infrastructure Stabilization Project. So come along with us to get a close-up look at the big issues here in Taylor Run. We are coming down the trail here, and so we have two sanitary sewer pipes that are crossing the stream. We're going to go take a look at them. And then we also have one sanitary manhole that is floating up above the stream, and that can be really risky, especially when we get our very high flows and extreme storms that come through Alexandria. So this is project area number one. This pipe is the first outfall of Taylor Run. As we see it's really big, but the plunge pole, otherwise known as this concrete riprap around, is not adequately sized to dissipate the energy. However, with the pipe this big, we need actually a lot more energy dissipation here. Now, what is energy dissipation though? Energy is everywhere. It is constantly hitting things, and it is the force that causes a lot of erosion here in Taylor Run. It also causes things to impact our sanitary sewers downstream with a lot of energy that could potentially break them apart. So here we will dissipate energy by having the water impact the rocks, which is why we use large rocks or boulders or cobblestones, and the rock is then taking on the energy because it's so big, the energy just goes through the rock and it gets dissipated, otherwise just reduced. We're right down this way, it's going to be our first sanitary sewer that is crossing the stream here. And as you can see, there's a lot of things that have fallen in the stream that could push up against the pipe here and actually potentially break it. So the best way to protect these pipes that cross the streams is to concrete encasement, which is what we're planning to do. This is kind of what we consider a floating outfall. And so as you see, the water drops down and thus causing erosion, increasing energy. So we're going to fix the head wall here and this entire area will have erosion dissipation material placed. So here is the sanitary sewer manhole that I've been mentioning in the project. This is one of the pieces of infrastructure that desperately needs protecting. Let's see how far up it's floating. Take a look. As we can see, there's a bunch of missing material down here. To protect this manhole and piece of valuable infrastructure here in the city, we're going to put rocks and stabilizing material underneath the manhole, and then we're going to create a gravity wall around the manhole so that any of the high velocities in the stream and the shearing stress that the stream goes on and also the things that might float down in that high velocity doesn't hit this manhole and potentially destabilize it. If it did destabilize, would then have potential raw sewage here in Taylor Run. Come along, this is our final sanitary sewer pipe that is crossing the stream here. As we can already see walking up, we see a lot of stuff pushed up against the pipe right now. So this is stuff we want to avoid. This could potentially hurt the pipe, it could break the pipe, especially when these big trees are coming at this pipe in a very high velocity with the big storms that we have. And we can actually get a little bit closer and see the pipe is right here.